Ryan Lane posted a couple of short videos of the WaterColorBot drawing a Storm Trooper and Seattle with markers. He traced a photo of the Storm Trooper and applied a half-tone filter before plotting with the WaterColorBot.
Yearly Archives: 2013
Tinkering in the News
[Video no longer available]
Our Peek-O-Book made an appearance in this segment on The Art of Tinkering on the news.
Eggbotted Ornaments
Bulbdial Tree Topper
From Maniacal Labs comes this unusual use for a Bulbdial Clock.
CNC Cut Height Adjustable Desk
Tyler wrote in about the adjustable height desk project he posted on the Adafruit blog:
I built a desk based off of your CNC Workstation Cart design. Thanks for your great write-up and materials list. I used your tab design exactly and everything fit together like a glove!
EEVBlog #555: The 555 kit review
Over at EEVblog, the (simply wonderful!) Electronics Engineering Video blog, Dave Jones has posted episode #555 — about our “Three Fives” discrete 555 timer kit. It’s an hour-long video, in which he builds the kit on camera, and more importantly walks through the the equivalent schematic to explain (and show) how it works, right down to probing the circuit with a scope. If you’re interested in how analog electronic circuits work, you’ll likely find it to be an excellent use of an hour, even if you’ve already built the kit yourself.
Snowflakes in your browser
Paul writes on twitter:
I ported your snowflake generator sketch from 2008 to js and added SVG export for easy laser cutting!
Also good for other kinds of CNC snowflakes, too.
The Winch Cutting Jig
In our recent article, The Making of the WaterColorBot, we walked through the manufacturing process of the WaterColorBot, in which we make use of a number of specialized jigs, with varying levels of complexity. We also left a teaser:
“The winch is also assembled from laser-cut wooden parts. The lower part has the shaft collar that mounts to the motor shaft, and the upper part has two halves that disassemble for cord management. It turns out that the winding-drum part of the winch needs to be quite round and concentric with the motor shaft for smooth operation– smoother than we can get with the laser. We solve this with our very-most-complicated assembly jig….”
And here it is.
Continue reading The Winch Cutting Jig
The 555 Footstool Design
By popular request, we are releasing the design files for our famous 555 Footstool project.
The design is made from 23 pieces of 1/2″ hardwood plywood, laminated together, in a sort of manual 3D printing process.
The design files are in Inkscape SVG format, and you can download the design here (a 28 kB .zip file).
Cool Tools: Drill Press Plus by Vanda-Lay
While in the course of a recent project, we ended up needing a machine to perform a particular operation. The operation was one that falls squarely into the (rather narrow) set of things that you would expect a “Dremel drill press” to be ideal for. And so (1) we got one, (2) found that it wasn’t very good and then (3) found an excellent alternative: The Drill Press Plus by Vanda-Lay Industries.
