Tag Archives: art

The Boldport Buggy

Boldport Buggy

Introducing the Boldport Buggy kit.

This simple and playful soldering kit is based on the on the beautiful Buggy circuit board designed by Saar Drimer of Boldport.

Boldport Buggy

Boldport Buggy

The first version of this circuit board was created as a badge for the hardwear.io hardware security conference in The Hague. This new version of the Buggy is a complete kit, featuring an updated circuit board, with a power switch and six candle-flicker LEDs.

Boldport Buggy

A cool detail is that its six legs are actually the current-limiting resistors for those six LEDs. They are posable (giving it quite a bit of personality) and we have given it little red tubing socks to cover up the otherwise-conductive feet.

Boldport Buggy Boldport Buggy

The Boldport Buggy kit is available now at our store, and you can read more about its design at Boldport.

Lego Space Flight Jacket – 1 Year Later

CLS Flight Jacket 15

Last January, I wrote about how to make your own traditional painted-leather “bomber” jacket, in a tutorial about how I made my Classic Lego Space Flight Jacket. Since then, several people have asked us for a future update post, to see how well it has aged after a year. And so, here we are. After a year of regular use, how well are those nifty flexible leather paints holding up?

Continue reading Lego Space Flight Jacket – 1 Year Later

Electro-Kistka: Alternate In-Place Egg Dyeing Technique

After seeing our recent post on dyeing in eggs in place with the Eggbot, Ragnar posted instructions in the forums for an alternative egg dyeing technique.

It involves pre-installing a plastic dyeing bag at the time of positioning the egg in the Eggbot. Full instructions (with more photos) are in the forum post. Thank you for demonstrating this technique, Ragnar!

3D LED POV Mirror

“We Are with You, Mirror” is a piece by Brady Marks from VIVO Media Arts Centre that was shown at the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire. It is a 3D persistence of vision volumetric display that acts as a mirror, using four spinning Peggy 2 boards to reflect visitors movements in low resolution 3D LED glory.

Thank you to Brady for sending in the video!

Highlights of the 2014 Bay Area Maker Faire

BAMF 2014 77

The 2014 Bay Area Maker Faire was an amazing, amazing event. We took hundreds of photos, which we have posted in a flickr set here. Here are just a few of the highlights— both technological and artistic, and we’ll be featuring several more over the course of the next week or so.

(Above: Rolf and Abhishek show off the new Arduino Zero in the Arduino booth.) Continue reading Highlights of the 2014 Bay Area Maker Faire

Stealth Fighter Guitar with Octolively Lighting Effects

Stealth plane guitar with octolively lighting

Herb wrote in to say:

When I saw your Octolively LED circuit, the first thing I wanted to do was incorporate it into our electric guitar project.

I teach a basic senior physics class for non-science majors and wanted to try something different; a year-long design project.

We made a guitar from scratch that resembles a stealth fighter. We even wound the humbucker coils in the guitar… Your circuit is used to drive the exhaust lights in response to playing motion…It works well and offers a unique visual effect based on the selected setting…you can even hear the circuit through the amplifier when it drives the blue LEDs…

The Octolively is wired up with the LEDs pointing down from the bottom of the guitar (back of the plane) and the sensors pointing toward the neck to respond the motion of the guitar player.

Stealth Octolively guitar in progress

His student, David, added:

Thank you for making such a great educational product to learn about LED’s and simple circuits. Our class worked together to put all of the parts in the correct place and it was a wonderful collaborative learning project.

Octolively assembly for incorporation into guitar

The Decoregger

Decoregger 1

Hey look! It’s the fossilized remains of a possible evolutionary ancestor of the EggBot!

Decoregger 2

Okay, it’s pre-USB but technically it’s not a fossil. Like many of us, the decoregger dates from the mid-1970’s. It’s a simple function gadget that mounts an egg so that you can spin it, with arm second arm that holds tiny felt-tip pens.  Curiously, there are also some contemporary machines bearing the same name that lack the separate arm.

 

Decoregger 3 Decoregger 4
Decoregger 5 Decoregger 6

In the upper-left photo, you can see that the pen holder has a separate “paddle” that you hold, to manually move the pen in the arc across the egg surface.  Lacking the proper felt-tip pens, we found that a uni-ball micro pen was about the right diameter to fit in the holder.

One surprising thing: To model this thing, we used regular “large AA” (not extra large, and not jumbo) size eggs from the grocery store. And it was only barely possible to squeeze the egg into the holders. From the picture on the box, it looks like there’s plenty of room for even the largest egg.  Possible explanation #1: Plastic shrinks over time. Possible explanation #2: The egg pictured on the box is from the advertising land of freaky micro-children.

But in any case, the decoregger is a cute little machine, and it looks like it might be fun to play with.  The actual play is a matter of turning knob 1 and knob 2, so it feels a lot like an Etch-a-Sketch in spherical coordinates. Now if only there were some way to strap a couple of motors to it and perform a CNC conversion….

Decoregger 8

Speaking of which, it really is a lot smaller than the EggBot.  Heck, you could probably fit the whole thing inside the EggBot.

Decoregger 7

Wait — am I doing this right?

Special thanks to Michelle Hlubinka for finding this artifact and sending it to us!

Pi Day is Here

Or, if you prefer, we’re halfway (well, 44% of the way) to Tau day, 6/28.  A fine day to watch the Vi Hart‘s Anti-Pi Rant. And, a fine day to round up some of our finest Pi, Pie, and mathematics projects:

Pi Blanket   Apple Pie

Pi blanket for Pi Day, and the Apple Apple Pie!

 

Earrings 2   Sierpinski Cookies-11

Sierpinski triangles out of polymer clay, and fractal cookies.

Fractal Snowflake Cupcakes - 24 fabric klein bottle

Fractal snowflake cupcakes, Fabric Klein bottle

Snowflake generator SymmetriSketch 2
Vector Snowflake generator application, and Symmetrisketch— for exploring other symmetries.

Christmas fractalSconic Sections
Christmas Chaos and Sconic Sections