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World Maker Faire NY 2014

wmf2014t

Did I mention I’ll be at Maker Faire New York on Sept. 20th & 21st, 2014? Well, I will! (Actually, I’ll be arriving on Friday the 19th, to be exact.)

I’ll mainly be covering the action for the Power Racing Series with multiple cameras and multiple roles. Chances are good you’ll see me running around the track and lying on the ground during the races. I may do a bit of driving as well on Sunday.

I also hope to catch a lot of the fair, as there will be much to see, and so little time to see it all…

If you’ll be there too and want to meet up, look for me at the racetrack, or get in touch with me through the various methods that seem to work for such things.

wmf2014b

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Quick and Dirty Screen Printing

Hey, this post is only four months late! I had these files sitting on my desktop so I thought I should do something with them instead of just deleting them. I’ll explain a little bit about the process of preparing artwork for screen printing in a timely manner. (Unlike this blog post.)

Back in May I did a screen printing demo at Bay View Gallery Night at Milwaukee Makerspace, so I figured I would make a new screen. I also figured I would use the vinyl method.

Art

I started with some weird drawing of a TV monster with the letters “BVGN” using a Sharpie on scrap paper.

Scanning

I scanned it in as a black & white image at 600 dpi and saved it as a TIFF file.

Raster TIFF file

The resulting scan looked like this. No grey tones, just high contrast black & white.

Converting

I then imported the (raster-based) TIFF file into Inkscape so I could convert it to vector artwork. The “Trace Bitmap” command lets you do the conversion.

Vector Art

Here is the artwork as an outline. Vector artwork is needed for the vinyl cutter part of the process. Typically there would be some cleanup after the conversion process, but I was doing this all really quickly and didn’t have time for perfection.

I didn’t get any photos of the vinyl cutting and screen prep part, but it’s explained well in this post and a bit in this post.

Screen Printed

For the event, I tore pages from an old book on video production and used the pages to print on. I wasn’t after amazing quality with these prints, I just wanted something to demo during the evening. I got a few clogs since the screen sat around with ink in it for over five hours, but that’s how these things go.

The nice thing about using vinyl is that it’s fast, and if you’ve got an idea you can go from a hard-drawn image to screen printing it in a matter of hours. The vinyl method doesn’t work for all artwork though, but that’s the trade-off.

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Change (Part II)

Change

Well, folks… I’m quite pleased to announce, it’s time for a change!

In December of 1993 I graduated from UWM with a BFA in Graphic Design. Now, nearly 21 years later, I’m returning. I’ll be pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts in a new program focused on Digital Fabrication and Design at UW-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts. Yes, I’m going to Graduate School.

I’ve had quite a bit of variety in the last two decades of my career, and the list of things I’ve done is getting lengthy, including design, software & web development, project management, photography, video, and audio production, system administration, model/actor, prop maker, technical editor, communications director, product development, writer, robot builder, race car driver… (OK, that last one is only slightly true.)

The one thing I’ve been surprised by when telling people about this change is that nearly everyone has been extremely supportive and excited about it. Their excitement may be due to my own excitement being reflected back, but I’ll take it!

Anyway, you can expect more changes in the coming months, but I’m pretty sure that no matter what the change brings, it’ll be exciting.

Onward!

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Change (Part I)

Change

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

…

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Printing 4-Up

Wheel 1-Up

We’re planning a Nerdy Derby event at Maker Faire Milwaukee, and like last year, I wanted to 3D print a bunch of wheels, and yes, it is fun designing strange wheels. Most of my designs this year are refinements from last year, and I wish 3D printing were as simple as hitting “print” and walking away, but that’s not always the case.

Wheels 4-Up

I found that if I printed one object, it worked fine. If I tried multiple objects, things were failing, either with one or more objects, or everything. I’d try to print two wheels at once, and one would work, the other would fail. Slic3r allows you to generate the G-Code needed to print files, and has an option to print multiple objects, either by printing them all at once, or one at a time. Both of those options just weren’t working for me, for whatever reason. (My 3D printer is a RepRap I built myself, and yes, it has issues now and then.)

But you know the old saying… if you can’t fix it in hardware, fix it in software! So I did… You’ll notice that the image above shows four wheels with a small square connecting them. I ended up pulling an STL file into OpenSCAD (my favorite 3D modeling application) and then duplicating it four times and adding a small 1mm tall square between them to connect it all into what the printer would see as one single object.

Wheels Printed 4-Up

It worked! I’m now seeing much more success with printing, and getting sets of 4 wheels connected with a thin piece of plastic that’s easy to remove. Oh, I should also mention that our friends at Inventables were kind enough to donate some filament to this cause, so if you have fun building a car with 3D printed wheels at Maker Faire, be sure to stop by the Inventables booth and thank them for making it happen.

(BTW, MegaMag is printing way more wheels than I am, and going 40-Up!)