Laser Cut Vacuum Forming Box
May 12th, 2013I designed this box to be laser from 3 sq feet of masonite. I designed it in Inkscape and lasercut it at Fab Lab Tulsa. I also posted it on thingiverse so you can make your own!
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:17984
A small collection of ‘Thats not good’ moments
May 12th, 2013Black on Black Retroflective vinyl! Now with Video!
May 12th, 2013Taking the glass off of a 24″ iMac
May 12th, 2013Just some Misc. Ferrari Pics
May 12th, 2013Butterfly Box
May 12th, 2013Making a PCB using Vinyl as an etch resist
May 12th, 2013Here is a step by step photo sequence on how to use cut vinyl (from a vinyl cutter) as an etch resist to make printed circuit boards (PCBs).
Wood Box ring
May 12th, 2013This is a wooden box ring that I made using techniques closer to metal jewelry than wood carving. I laminated 3 pieces of walnut together (Cut with jewelers saw and along different grain lines). I sawed on it and filed it until I was happy with the shape and fit then took to polishing.
3 phase linear actuator fun!
May 12th, 2013Click on them to watch the videos!
I picked up a couple 3 phase linear actuator tracks (magnets) and armatures (coils and hall effects) along with some 3 phase servo amplifiers. Not only are they terrifyingly quick (and this is at 80v they are rated to 300V!) but also can push with significant force. A couple of fun things I did with them:
Put them on a not very stable table and use an accelerometer as the input, depending on the phase, you either get an actively stabilized table or one that oscillates at its resonant frequency!
Hooked to audio source and played some music.
And hooked to an arduino and to my computer.
These are not (very) closed loop (yet) but with careful input offset adjustment you get good static behavior.
More Bubble display info!
May 6th, 2013I built a display system that displays in bubbles (a couple years ago, at the time I had not seen any others). I used some solenoids (surplus), a small air pump (surplus), an Arduino, A glass tank that I built from tempered glass sheets, and a bunch of glycerine. I wrote some Processing code that processes a jpeg image and spits out bit codes for the arduino software I wrote. The arduino sequences the solenoids (down to a few tens of microseconds, tuned per solenoid!) to produce a dot (bubble?) matrix image that gradually floats up through the liquid. I chose glycerine, for a few reasons, it is clear, it is very viscous (initial water tests indicated that I needed more viscosity to slow the bubbles), it is water soluble for easy cleanup, can be derived from plants, it is not very volatile (or smelly) and not likely to catch on fire (those are basically all the reasons I did not use oil of some sort). I whipped up the full scale exhibit (prototype) piece in 2 weeks.
Because Materials are cool, Pyrolytic graphite
May 6th, 2013Its not magic, but it sure is cool. Very diamagnetic, so it floats above strong magnets. Very thermally conductive (well in one plane, which on its own a difference of thermal conductivity of over 2 orders of magnitude depending on direction is awesome), cuts through ice like butter (as long as your fingers stay warm that is).
Some scratch built LED flashlights from 2011
May 6th, 2013New LEDs (under 3.2 v forward voltage) and new batteries (LiFe) which have a nicely matched voltage curve. And a single cell AAA boost converter design. Mine are much brighter than some commercially available ones.
Some random projects
May 6th, 2013Replacing carbon ceramic brakes on a ferrari (and turning one of those into a silly clock). Switchable LCD film. Modding an LED headlamp. A needlessly complex window doorswitch from a Saab. A porsche GT2 exhaust.
RGB LED Strobe
May 6th, 2013I played around with this technique in high school, but NOW there are some crazy bright LEDs that work a lot better. The basic concept is to strobe red, green and blue LEDs so quickly that it looks like a constant white light. Then instead of strobing the colors at the same time flash them at different times. You still see a constant white, until something moves, then you see a color separated strobe style image. It is pretty cool to look at, AND could be used for scientific uses (green is .5ms, blue is 1 ms, red is .5 seconds). Or as I hope to do at some point make a single handed clock (A rather quickly spinning hand, with rather precisely timed (and synchronized) strobe pulses).
Projector+Camera+Computer
May 6th, 2013Here are a few videos of interactive uh, video. (sorry the only interaction you get is the play button). Most utilize a pico projector, a PS3 camera and my mac. I also was playing around with OSC control and an actual glass touch panel. Quartz composer on apple is just silly simple (and brings back LabView memories)
Get ready
May 1st, 2013So what has happened in the last 1 year 9 months and three days? Well, quite a bit. Be prepared for a rapid fire update on projects, happenings and more!