Laser-etching is a modern process that effectively carves a 1-bit image onto a material. A lot of very cool images can be made with it, given enough artistic talent. I’m not one of them. Fortunately, all that heavy lifting has been done for me by artists far more talented than me. In the 16th century… Read More: 20 Percent Time »
After moving again at the beginning of December, I’ve realised that I’ve built a lot of things, but nothing could really be called pretty in the conventional sense. There’s a lot of room in my new place, and I need something I created to display. Visitors should be able to come into my house (after… Read More: Gears gears gears gears gears »
Here is the motor that I’ll be using. I don’t know if I mentioned this already, but I’ve got a big bag of these things. I don’t know where they originally come from, and I can’t find any sort of datasheet or description on the internet. But that’s okay. I can work around that.… Read More: Closing the Loop »
There’s a new tool on the block, you might have heard of it. They call it a Raspberry Pi, and it’s neither infinite, nor raspberry-flavoured (I checked). It’s a System on a Chip, or a tiny computer. A big part of its selling point was that it was $25. This kinda got shifted up to… Read More: Pie-faced »
I’ve opened up two sacrificial motors, and they definitely seem to have some sort of on-board Hall effect sensors. I haven’t looked for the pinout yet, but chips were all labelled 1036 for one of the motors, and J588m for the other one. Google turns up nothing about these (that I can find). The motor… Read More: Software »
At this stage in the game, this project is on a clear path to completion, with no major revisions in sight. What I’d like to do is identify some issues that have made themselves apparent during the build and tweaking processes. Some are things that I would fix in the version 2, if one were… Read More: Problem identification. The doldrums. »
Putting it all together. The materials I used are a little more than the final product requires, some material was used up in mistakes or scrapped in newer revisions, but here is what I started with: 2′ x 3′ 3/8″ acrylic ($20) 6″ x 6″ 1/8″ acrylic ($10) 4x 3/8 bolts 4x 3/8 lock… Read More: Relapse (Build) »
In the time since I designed my timelapse camera gimbal, I’ve laid everything out for laser cutting, researched companies that offer cutting services, and very carefully decided not to send it out. As an initial draft, I wasn’t ready to spend $150 on a process that I’ve never used before. Fortunately, the excellent Laser… Read More: Relapse (Design) »
I should mention that sometime last year, I built a UV exposure box for manufacturing PCBs. It’s pretty rough, but I built it over the course of an evening to do one job, and it does it quite well. Or at least, I think it worked quite well. The idea of being able… Read More: Lightbox, State of my custom PCBs »