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:
I'll Take My Tofu Black, Thank You.
My partner has been on a food science kick for a while now. We started with kombucha. Several bottles of the carbonated, tart beverage later we declared the experiment a success. Then we moved onto kim-chi. As a certain roommate of ours so eloquently put it while wrinkling her nose, “that smells like kim-chi”. Another success.
First, Assume A Perfectly Spherical Aerialist
One of the great things about the scientific process, is the little surprises one stumbles across. A few weeks ago I was a designing a specialized piece of circus rigging to drop one half of a 100Lb ladder. It has a quick release mechanism, which when activated, drops the ladder 4′ mid performance. Now, how to figure out how strong the components should be?