When I Grow Up.
Two years ago I quit my job at a silicon valley based froot company to follow my dream of becoming any thing but a computer programmer. I had been programming since I was 15, professionally since I was 19, and it was high time to move on to another career. This is hard. As I’m often fond of pointing out to other makers: any sufficiently interesting hardware problem will devolve into a software problem.
On Laser Repair.
Recently, I acquired a laser cutter.
It’s a giant beast of a thing, originally designed for fabric cutting. It was built by the Han Yue Ming Laser Company in Dongguan, China and features an enormous 1400x900mm cutting envelope and a 150W tube. We do a lot of design work around here that gets cut out on lasers, so finally having one in house was pretty exciting!
Perfection Through Iteration
The past couple of months have gone by in a blur. After finishing a short term contract building inflatable walking robots, I dashed off to the UK for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Upon returning I’ve decided I really need to take some time to finish a few projects of my own that I’ve been putting off for a while.
The Accidental Strobist
Recently, my friend and long time collaborator, Audrey Penven, presented me with an interesting problem. She was preparing for a photo shoot with vocalist/composer Jill Tracy, and wanted to project slides of fabric as a part of the light source. Normally, this would have been a simple case of “put slide in projector, plug projector into wall”, but the photo shoot had one unfortunate drawback: no power.
Another Use For Loadcells
While searching around the web today I stumbled upon this great article by Christian Liljedahl about his adventures getting loadcells to work with the arduino. I especially like the application: