Plotter People Talk

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Lenore on stage with slide of electronic kits in background
Photo courtesy of @plotterpeople

Yesterday I gave a talk at the inaugural Plotter People meetup titled Plotter Projects from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. My slides were a series of pictures from our projects, so rather than publish the presentation itself, I’m publishing a list of links to all of the projects I talked about.

The first part of the talk was introductory information about Evil Mad Scientist with some example projects from our blog and our early kits.

The main part of the talk delved into all of our plotter related projects, including hacking plotters, things we’ve made from plotters, software we’ve made for use with plotters, and plotters we’ve made.

Many thanks to Plotter People for inviting me to speak!

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Linkdump: December 2018

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Plotter People Meetup

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There’s a new get-together just for plotter people!

Plotter People is a meetup for creative coders and people interested in collaborating with robots to make art. You’ll get to talk to folks who make generative art in a wide variety of programming languages and software environments, and you’ll get access to pen plotters and the people who make them.

The inaugural Plotter People meetup will be hosted at Github in San Francisco on Monday, January 14 at 6:30 pm. There will be two speakers, including Sher Minn, who will be talking about Recreating Retro Plotter Art, and me, Lenore Edman. I’m excited to have been invited to speak and I’ll be talking about the Plotter Projects of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, from the Analog Plotbot pictured above to the AxiDraw. There will also be time to mingle, talk, eat, and even play with plotters.

The event is free, but please head over to the invite page to RSVP!

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Stroboscopic Ornaments

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Jiří Zemánek, whose EggBot work we have featured before, sent in this wonderful video of stroboscopically animated Christmas ornaments.

The stroboscopic patterns are designed in MATLAB and drawn by EggBot Pro on colored glass Christmas ornaments. Motion of the balls is controlled by custom mechanism built using components from two Prusa i3 MK3 3D printers, like six stepper motors and two Rambo boards. On top of designing the patterns, which is Jiri’s hobby (when he is not busy with research) and building the whole contraption in a very short time, the team had to deal with issues including non-spherical ornaments, or how to use Rambo board to precisely control the velocity profiles.

We love to see how people make things, and Jiri did not disappoint, sharing process photos of making the rotation mechanisms.

With great help from his colleagues Martin, Krištof, and Filip they took Christmas ornaments to the next level and taught them to dance!

The final setup shot captures how they created such a beautiful video.

Merry Christmas to Jiri and the Advanced Algorithms for Control and Communications group! Thank you for sharing your project!

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Linkdump: November 2018

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Maker Gift Basket

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Gareth Branwyn posted an article on creating a gift basket for makers. It is full of awesome tools, including one of our favorites, the resistor lead forming tool.

He’s also having a give-away for his example basket!

To be eligible, all you have to do is post an entry, on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, mentioning my book, this article, and/or the idea of a tool gift bag, and include this link and hashtag: https://amzn.to/2DPaXAd #tipsandtalesfromtheworkshop. The only things you have to include are the link and the hashtag. You can post as many times as you like. On Dec 12th, I’ll do a random drawing from the hash-tagged entries and send out your gift basket.

Note: This drawing is only available to those residing in the United States.

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New Magnetic Easels for AxiDraw

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We’ve just added two new magnetic easels for AxiDraw to our lineup of AxiDraw accessories. They are sturdy work-holding tools that provide an alternative method of positioning paper or other workpieces for use with the AxiDraw. A heavy-duty alternative to the regular clip easel, they can be used with binder clips or the included positioning rulers and magnets.

The Letter/A4 size easel works with the AxiDraw V3.

The Tabloid/A3 size easel works with the AxiDraw V3/A3 and the AxiDraw SE/A3 models.

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