Categories
Uncategorized

Happy Hannukah

Dreidel

Dreidel

Happy Hannukah, everyone! Here’s the dreidel I made. It’s not made out of clay, or even “brey” (which is lead) but it is made out of ABS plastic. You know, the same plastic that LEGO are made of. You can make your own, just grab the file from Thingiverse and print it on your home 3D printer. Don’t have a 3D printer at home? You could always swing by Milwaukee Makerspace, or maybe the next MKE3DP Meetup.

Dreidel

If you’re wondering why the top of the dreidel is a funky black while the rest is white, it’s due to switching filament colors from black to white before printing, but not bothering to clear out all the black. I do this on purpose sometimes, because it causes this interesting effect.

Also, if the handle looks weird, it’s because I broke it and then re-attached it with acetone, but did it upside down. It still turned out very nice, in my opinion!

Categories
Uncategorized

Still Macin’ (for now)

MacBook Pro

The phrase “I am no longer Apple’s Target Market” is one that I can identify with… and the blog post of the same name makes a lot of good points.

I’ve been using computers (mostly made by Apple) for over 30 years. Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon at this point, but I actually like being able to see the file system, and I don’t want or need some specially curated “App Store” or procedures to protect me from naughty applications I download from the big, bad Internet. I’ve been doing fine for nearly 20 years. As for people who do need such things, I understand the need, but I hope I’m not further restricted due to others and their (lack of) knowledge.

I’ve said this before, and I’ve said it again, there’s a learning curve to using computers, and I’m fine with that. There’s a learning curve to operating a motor vehicle, or a table saw, or a pencil sharpener. There should be. That’s part of life. Learning should not be looked upon as something that is a bad thing, and hey, I’m sorry, but you might have to actually learn a bit to use a computer, or table saw, or kitchen appliance. I’m not saying some things don’t need to be easier, but there’s a middle ground between ease of use, and restrictions of freedoms we once had. And easier? Hell, it’s a million times easier that it once was. Why, when I was a kid you turned on your Apple II and got a blinking cursor. No icons. No menus.

I use Apple hardware, and I use a lot of Apple software (and a lot more non-Apple software.) I also use Linux a lot. Linux has never been my desktop OS of choice, but for servers I love it. I do run some Linux desktop machines though, and they’ve improved much over the years. The work I do though, does at this time require Mac OS X.

I have a first generation iPad. I love it. It’s a great device for what it is. It is not a computer. Sometimes I wish it was a computer, but I find it very enjoyable to use as it is. I wish it were more open though. (But I wish that about a lot of things.)

Mac OS X is still my favorite desktop operating system. Is it perfect? Nope. Has it gotten better or worse over the years? Probably both. I’ve always got a terminal open with multiple tabs, which is something 95% (?) or Mac users probably don’t do.

Anyway, it’s December 2012, and I’m still using Macs (a lot) for business and personal use, and most of the time, they work well for me. I’ll let you know where I’m at some time in 2013.

Categories
Uncategorized

Two Square Feet of Art

M

Our story of the M begins when my friend Tiffany from While You Were Out Pet Sitting Service mentioned she was doing a charity event called Red, White & Black: 100 Square Feet of Art. If you remember the old “250 Square Feet of Art” event the Eisner used to hold (and I took part in) it’s like that. Artists create 12″x12″ boards, and they get auctioned off. So I volunteered.

I started with this letter M, in the typeface Umbra BT. I liked the 3D quality of it, and since I also love using the laser cutter at Milwaukee Makerspace, I had a plan.

M

The Photoshop mock-up was just an idea, so I re-created the letter M in Inkscape to prepare it to be laser cut. You’ll notice right now that the M in the first image and second image don’t match exactly. (I wish I had noticed at the time!)

I cut the shapes out of 1/8″ Baltic Birch plywood. My plan was to cut one board like this, and I’d the use the pieces to attach to another board, and the template piece as an assembly guide. Good idea, right? Right.

M

My next thought was, “Why waste full boards to get more pieces?” and I arranged the pieces to minimize waste. This works well for general assembly of things, but for art, maybe not so much. The pieces cut fine, but I did have to deal with kerfs, some scorching, the grain of the wood, etc. None of those things were huge deals, but they’re things to be aware of in the future.

M

At this point it was just a matter of assembly. A bit of glue, and bit of wood stain, what could go wrong?

M

There was a lot of time spent with the glue and the clamps. Well, most of the time was spent waiting for glue to dry. I obviously need another 20 spring clamps. Just for fun, this is about the time I got sick and had a work overload, so I started getting really concerned about completing this on time. (It gets worse.)

M

Here it is done! I call it “M1” by the way. An “M” for “Milwaukee” or “Mike” or “Mary” or whatever you like… or you could flip it over and make it a “W” for “Wisconsin”, etc.

I also had a nightmare time with the wood stain, though I managed to recover that by changing the piece. I learned everything I’d forgotten about staining wood in the 20 years since I’ve last done it.

M

Here’s a side view of M1 showing the dimensionality of the piece. The M is about 3/8″ thick.

M

But wait, what’s that? I still have that leftover piece that I used as an assembly template! Hmmm…

M

Yeah, here’s “M2” as it were. I figured that a perfectly nice piece of laser cut wood should not go to waste, so I came up with another idea. I reversed the color scheme of the stains on the two pieces of wood, attached the front piece to a back piece, and blammo! Another wonderful(?) piece of laser cut art.

M

I think I may actually like M2 better than M1, maybe just because of the process that created it, but hey, you be the judge, or the critic, or the bidder, or whatever. Cheers!

Categories
Uncategorized

Snowflakey

Kimotion Arts

Tennis Man

Here’s a thing I’m calling (for lack of a better name) “Snowflakey”. The idea came from the Kimotion Arts store on Shapeways.

Kimotion Arts

Kimotion Arts has these neat 3D printed ornaments with an object arranged in a circle to make a snowflake-like thing. I dig it, so I decided to dig into it.

Bad Man

The first thing I did was fire up Inkscape and draw a really simple figure. It’s terrible, really, but I did it in less time than it took Inkscape to launch on Mac OS X. I created an SVG file, and then exported it as a DXF file, making sure I converted all the line segments into straight lines first. (Of course there were no curves in this drawing, but if there were, I’d convert them!)

Bad Man Flake

Once I had my DXF file, it was easy to pull that into OpenSCAD, and place six of them in a circle with the following code. 


objheight = 4;
objcenterspacing = 20;
objrotate = -70;

for (i = [0:5]) {
  rotate(i*360/6, [0,0,1])
    translate([0, objcenterspacing, 0])
      rotate([0, 0, objrotate]) 
        linear_extrude(height = objheight, center = true) 
          import( "figure.dxf" );
}

The code is not the greatest… in fact there is probably much room for improvement, but it’s the first thing I got working, so I ran with it. My idea for the 3 variables at the top were so you could easily tweak them for different art. Sadly, as you change objcenterspacing and objrotate, they affect each other, so it’s a lot of back and forth between those two values. I also could not find a way to assign a filename to a variable, so your DXF will need to be named “figure.dxf” or you’ll need to edit the import line.

Tennis Man

Since my drawing was so terrible I wanted to try something else, so what better than Land recreation symbols 27, better known as “Tennis Man” by most people.

Tennis Man Flake

A few quick edits and I had this nice Tennis Man Snowflake for that special ball smasher on your list… (Notice the canvas size of 25mm wide by 35mm high. You can do what you want, but the OpenSCAD code will be expecting something close to that. Otherwise you’ll just have to tweak the numbers even more.)

Blobby Man Flake

I decided to try once again to draw something. This one took a little longer than a minute, but turned out just as terrible as the first one I did. Still, maybe you like “Blobby Man” as a snowflake.

Ant Flake

How about ants? This one is interesting. Maybe spiders would have been a better choice. (And yes, I know I could probably do the entire “6 items rotated” thing right in Inkscape, but that wasn’t the goal here.)

Horse Flake

What about the old nag? No, I’m not taking about your mother-in-law (kidding!) but this fine old horse from OpenClipArt.org, where I get many of the SVG files I use. Export this as an STL file and you’re ready to print it on your RepRap!

If you’ve got an improvement to this OpenSCAD code, by all means, let me know. I’m still very much in the learning phase with OpenSCAD, so I do these things to learn, and because of that I’m open to any suggestions.

Categories
Uncategorized

Holiday Make-A-Thon 2012 [Time Lapse]

Hack Friday

Here’s a quick time-lapse video from the 2012 Holiday Make-A-Thon that Milwaukee Makerspace does in cooperation with Bucketworks. We’ve been doing it for 3 years now, and Bucketworks has been doing it on their own even longer.

It seems like a lot more hackerspaces are doing these type of events this year, which is awesome, and there’s even a nice name for it now: Hack Friday. In my mind, part of belonging to a makerspace/hackerspace is the love of creating things, sharing that with others, especially on a day that has become completely over the top in regards to consumerism. Our mission is plain and simple: Instead of buying useless crap on “Black Friday” join us and we’ll help you make something for the holidays.

I figured it was also a good time to test out the time lapse capabilities of the GoPro Hero3. I have a workflow in place that includes taking still images with the intervalometer and then combining the frames into a video, and then resizing and cropping the video to the correct proportions. It seems to work. Oh, and the camera motion near the end is actually the gaff tape giving out before the camera fell face-down. Enjoy!