- Pillows based on ant faces. Backstory here.
- The Titanic was on fire, before the iceberg.
- Forever Pizza: Real pizza, encased in acrylic (via Laughing Squid)
- Turn your cell phone into an Etch A Sketch with 3D printing
- On the design of the nacelle struts in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (via io9)
- How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects
- How restaurants got so loud
- Giant New Salamander Species Discovered in Florida and Alabama
- A map of locations from which you can see the sun set right in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge
- 3D printed 7-segment clock
- The Best Laid Tracks: Stories of San Francisco’s ghost stations
- Spotify player for the Mac SE/30
- Miniature Japanese Furniture for Cats
- Millitext: Subpixel encoding and a one-pixel-wide font
- A controlled medical study on the effectiveness of parachutes in preventing injury
- A Primer on Bézier Curves
- A collection of mechanical Keyswitch datasheets from keyboard.io
- Recovering Nintendo’s Lost SimCity for the NES
- The best fossilized mummified dinosaur ever (there’s also one named after Zuul)
Plotter People Meetup
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!Stroboscopic Ornaments
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!
Ultraviolet Hanukiah
For Hanukkah this year, Ol Rappaport modified one of our Deluxe LED Menorah kits into a custom fluorescent acrylic body, substituted UV LEDs and used a USB power supply.
Linkdump: November 2018
- Paper Pulp 3D Printer
- Jackie Speier on Surviving Jonestown
- Puzzle Montage Art by Tim Klein
- London Tube Cutaways
- Why your mental map of the world is (probably) wrong
- Rare microbes lead scientists to discover new branch on the tree of life
- OSH Park launched a snazzy new Flex PCB service
- The Lunar Swirl
- Siser EasyWeed, a laser-friendly, vinyl-cutter-friendly iron-on material. Neat.
- The fake rolex of canned tomatoes
- Tymkrs and the Art of Circuitry
- Retro tees at Radio Shack
- Screen printed Circuit Portraits
Maker Gift Basket
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.
BristleBot in HackSpace
Our BristleBot project is included in an article on toothbrush projects in the December issue of Hackspace Magazine.
New Magnetic Easels for AxiDraw
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.
RealTalk Electronics: on tariffs
The Supplyframe Magazine RealTalk Electronics was released at the Hackaday Superconference.
It includes the article State of the Electronics Trade War which we contributed to.
It’s awesome to be included in this group of authors!
PCB Etching with AxiDraw
Patricio Gonzalez Vivo has been using AxiDraw for circuit board etching experiments.
He draws on copper clad boards with a Sharpie marker with the AxiDraw.
Drawing is followed by a chemical bath.
The marker is cleaned off of the remaining copper to reveal the design. It came out beautifully.
Etching orbits and planets into PCB boards using @EMSL #axidraw more images and videos here https://t.co/joJeG7hQgA pic.twitter.com/22ERZM96gn
— PatricioGonzalezVivo (@patriciogv) November 10, 2018
If you’ve used the AxiDraw for marker masking for etching, we’d love to hear about it!