The EggBot is Back, and it’s better than ever. Bantam Tools is spreading holiday cheer with the launch of the Bantam Tools EggBot™ Ornament Edition, a drawing machine designed to transform blank glass spheres into unforgettable custom ornaments you’ll take delight in unpacking every year for decades to come. Available Now.
The plotter adventure continues at Bantam Tools!
Bantam Tools proudly announces the launch of the new Bantam Tools ArtFrame™ Art Machine System—designed for professional artists to create physical art from digital designs with traditional materials.
Key Features:
The Bantam Tools ArtFrame prototypes created thousands of drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Engineered and manufactured under leadership of the Evil Mad Scientist team in Peekskill, NY.
Learn more at bantamtools.com
It’s time for our annual reminder that we love Halloween! Our Halloween Project Archives is a great resource for inspiration and ideas.
Halloween is one of our favorite holidays, and … we’ve organized dozens of our Halloween projects into categories: costumes, pumpkins, decor and food.
Tiny product update: A new version of the pen holder for AxiDraw, with slots for quick adjustment between the vertical and 45 degree angle positions.
Tracing the Line is a book of plotter art available for preorder now, coming out this November. Many of our featured artists are included in the book, and AxiDraw makes several appearances in the video teaser. Looks like it will be fantastic!
We’re pleased to note the release of AxiDraw software version 3.9 this week, with a couple of neat new features. One of them is that the “preview mode” button — which lets you simulate plotting to see how the results will come out — is now accessible no matter which function is selected. The other, the big one, is that AxiDraw now supports hidden-line removal as a standard feature.
There’s a full changelog up on GitHub, which also notes a few new features for users of the AxiDraw CLI (command-line interface) and AxiDraw Python library, including the ability to resume a plot a little before where it was paused.
But, let’s talk more about hidden-line removal.
Continue reading Hidden line removal for AxiDraw
Windell, along with Eric Schlaepfer, was recently on the Embedded.fm podcast talking about their book, Open Circuits. You can listen to the episode or read the transcript. You can still sign up for the Embedded newsletter by the end of July and be entered to win a copy of Open Circuits or a Three Fives Soldering Kit.
I’m very pleased to announce my forthcoming new book, Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components, co-written with Eric Schlaepfer.
Open Circuits is a coffee table book full of cross-section photographs of electronic components, along with photos of those components in context, and descriptions of how they work. It’s coming this fall from No Starch Press, and is available now to pre-order.
From the rear cover:
Open Circuits is a photographic exploration of the surprisingly beautiful design waiting to be discovered inside everyday electronic devices. Through painstakingly prepared cross-sections and stunningly vivid close-up images, the book reveals a hidden world full of elegance, subtle complexity, and wonder. From simple resistors and capacitors, to cutting-edge circuit boards and retro Nixie tubes, the authors’ arresting imagery transforms more than 130 electronic components into awe-inspiring works of art that will delight engineers, artists, designers, and photography enthusiasts alike.
My co-author Eric Schlaepfer has been our regular collaborator on projects such as the Three Fives and XL741 soldering kits, as well as the MOnSter 6502 and our Uncovering the Silicon project.
Open Circuits is coming this fall in hardcover, and is available now with a pre-order discount and early-access PDF from No Starch Press.
It’s also available to pre-order at your local bookstore — who we sincerely encourage you to support — as well as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other major booksellers.
DIYODE Magazine is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 555 and used our Three Fives Kit for an accompanying build.
It’s awesome to see this workhorse of a chip getting well-deserved attention, and we love seeing our kit included in the festivities.
Scientists working on developing techniques for bioprinting used the AxiDraw with a syringe in place of a pen as part of their experimental setup. They recently published an article they shared with us, saying,
We finally achieved what we planned with the Axidraw. It worked well! We made small patterns of hydrogel, millimetric, that we intend to use for seeding living cells.
It is always exciting for us to see people finding new uses for the AxiDraw. Thank you to Dr. Fitremann for sharing your results with us!
