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Read This Carefully

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2014-05-20

There’s a great post by Cameron Moll on Medium titled The Economics of a Kickstarter Project (or How Much I Didn’t Make) which breaks down the numbers and offers some good advice for would-be crowd-funders.

I don’t know much about Cameron, and I won’t speak ill of him or his abilities, in fact, I love the Brooklyn Bridge piece he created, but I’ve worked in the creative industry (and the print industry) long enough to understand the importance of proofing things. Oh, I call it “proofing” but Proofreading is the more correct term.

About 20 years ago I worked for the creative division of a printing company, and I just happened to be tagging along to a press check with an account executive and they thought I’d like that the brochure being printed had a domain name on it. (Hey, it was the late 1990s!) When I pointed out that the domain name being printed was not one the company owned, there was quite a bit of commotion. There may have been some swearing and yelling as well. (Note: printing ink on paper is often very expensive!)

Over the years I’ve seen time and time again that making mistakes in print is a sure way to lose money. Indeed, had Cameron hired someone to proof his work, and even if he paid them $1000, he would have doubled the amount he had left at the end of his campaign had the proofer caught his mistake.

Proofing is not the same as “checking you work” because you are often blind to your own mistakes. You need another pair of eyes, hopefully a well-trained pair of eyes, to see the things you can’t see. (I’ve seen artists get so obsessed with the details of the type they are designing that they spell their own names wrong!)

Don’t take this post to say I don’t make mistakes, I make plenty of them! I make spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes, though they typically aren’t in print. I made one earlier today on a Facebook post, and one of my coworkers caught it for me. That’s how it works. You can’t do it alone.

Note: I’m currently working as a Technical Editor for a book that should be out this summer. If you enjoyed the previous book I worked on, I think you’ll like this one too. If you need a Technical Editor, get in touch with me.

Tags book, editor, kickstarter, mistakes, proofing

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MaKey MaKey Banana Pong [code]

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2014-05-09

I’m posting this because someone asked for it, and I aim to please… Here’s the Banana Pong code. I used code someone else wrote to bootstrap this thing, but there was no comment about who wrote it, and I didn’t make record of where I grabbed it, so… no attribution. Sorry! If it’s your code, let me know.

Have fun playing Banana Pong with your MaKey MaKey!

Note: The first ZIP file is the Processing source code. The second is a Mac OS X application. Since Processing has changed how it exports applications I can’t easily create versions for Windows and Linux like I did for the Apple Piano code. So if you want a Windows or Linux standalone version, you’ll need to grab the code and do it yourself. It should serve as a good starting point.

Tags bananas, code, makeymakey, processing

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3D “Drawing” Pens

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2014-05-08

There’s a number of so-called “3D Printing Pens” on the market now, or coming soon, though in reality I think they should be called “3D Drawing Pens”. I mean, you don’t have a “2D Printing Pen” do you? Pens are for drawing, they are not printers that print.

I know a lot of people are excited about these things, thinking it’s the cheapest way to get into 3D Printing (if they work) because you’ve probably seed some amazing photos of things people are creating with these things…

Well, here’s my thought on these pens:

If you’re terrible at drawing in two dimensions, you’re probably going to be terrible at drawing in three dimensions.

Yeah, if you’re a skilled artist who knows how to work a pen, you might make some awesome things. That’s how art works, but don’t expect to pick one of these up and create a masterpiece the first time.

That said, I do think these “3D Drawing Pens” are interesting, and I look forward to see where they go, and I await an open hardware version.

Tags 3d, 3dprinting, art

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Arduino(ish) Keyboarding

Teensy is teensy

For the past few years I’ve been building devices that can emulate computer keyboards. Typically I’ve used the Teensy microcontrollers for this along with the Arduino IDE and the Teensyduino add-on. The things you can do with a Teensy to emulate a keyboard are very impressive! Basically, it’s the best way I know of to create your own custom USB keyboard.

Size matters – A-Star with Arduino Micro and Leonardo

When the Arduino Leonardo was introduced, one of the features I was interested in was the ability to emulate a USB keyboard. I never actually got a Leonardo to test this with, mainly because the form factor was too large for my projects. Sometimes shield compatibility is good, sometimes the smallest board wins.

Size matters!

I recently got a Pololu A-Star 32U4 Micro, which is a tiny (and cheap, under $13USD) board very similar to a Leonardo, once again using the Atmel ATmega32U4.

There may be a little bit of work involved in getting the A-Star up and running. There are drivers needed if using Windows, and (supposedly) a little more work to get things going with Linux. I had no issues with Mac OS X, but I’m pretty familiar with add-ons for the Arduino IDE due to using Teensyduino. You can also just pretend this is an Arduino Leonardo and that seems to work fine.

(I also can’t tell if the Pololu A-Star 32U4 Micro is open source hardware. They do have a bunch of files available, but I did not see an explicit “Open Hardware” note anywhere. It’s worth mentioning that the Teensy is not open source hardware. If that’s not a big deal to you, then it’s not a big deal to you. The official Arduino hardware is of course, open source.)

I’ll probably keep experimenting with the Pololu A-Star as a keyboard emulator for simple things, and stick with the Teensy for more complex things. I’ve also heard that the Teensy 2.0 will disappear in the future, which isn’t a huge deal, as the Teensy 3.1 is a big improvement over it, but the 3.1 does cost a bit more than the 2.0, so that’s one factor to consider when evaluating which board to use.

Have fun building your own keyboard!

Update #1: I’ve been talking to Pololu and they suggested the A-Star may actually be able to use the Teensyduino Keyboard libraries. I’m awaiting more info on this, as it would be an exciting development.

Update #2: It looks like the Teensyduino Keyboard libraries cannot be installed onto the A-Star, which is good to know. But don’t worry, I’ll be using the A-Star for some future projects anyway. ;)

Tags arduino, astar, keyboard, microcontrollers, pololu, teensy, usb

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Chess + Art + 3D Printing

Recently my pal Bryan Cera posted about resurrecting Marcel Duchamp’s hand-carved chess set, which is a project he’s working on with Scott Kildall.

Bryan shot me an email and asked if I’d be interested in printing a set as well. To be honest, most of the stuff I print on my RepRap is meant to be functional parts, and they typically don’t turn out pretty, but hey, I’m an art lover, and I like collaborative projects.

Bryan mentioned that the set should be printable even on a “homebrew” 3D printer, but personally, I hate printing with support, so I try to not use it. I took the pawn and split it in half and then printed it and glued it together with a bit of Acetone.

Oh, I also painted the pawn with metallic silver paint. You can see that this is not a super-high quality print, but I’m OK with that. I sort of like the way the lines appear on this piece.

I also printed the rook. I split this one by removing the top for printing and then reattaching it.

I did the same with the bishop, and will probably do this with the rest of the pieces (and maybe re-do the pawn this way, or maybe do the opposite and re-do all the pieces the same way I did the pawn!)

Here’s the bishop being assembled. Acetone melts the plastic, so I just dabbed a bit onto the two surfaces and then hold things together for a few hours with some rubber bands. (Luckily the bishop has a rubber band-holding slot!)

It’s been a fun project so far, and the only reason I’ve not finished the entire set is that I’ve been traveling for work the last few weeks. Once I’ve got all the pieces, I’ll capture some nice images of the set.

And yes, the knight is going to be a fun challenge!

(Thanks to Bryan and Scott for including me in this project!)

Tags 3dprinting, art, chess, duchamp