Andrew S. Harmon

I stitched the door back up after an airbag deployed.

I 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

Well there is your problem! (or at least one of them!)

This was an idea I had a while back to ‘hide’ things in plain sight.

My hard drive died and this is how you get to it….

As usual click on the picture for MORE pictures.

Various projects, brakes, exhaust, and more.

I got to do a number of projects with this car.

I did a bit of bouldering last summer.

This is a box that I designed and built. Details are available by clicking the pictures.

Here 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).

This 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.

Click 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.

I 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.

Its 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).

New 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.

Replacing 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.

I 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).

Here 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)

So 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!