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Nerdy Derby – Poundin’ Sand

Poundin' Sand

If you saw my last post about the Nerdy Derby we are planning, you probably figured at some point you’d see a car. Well, here’s my progress so far.

I cut the pieces from 3mm Baltic Birch plywood using the 60 watt laser cutter at Milwaukee Makerspace. Even the wheels are laser cut. I have no idea how well it will work, but I’m all for experimentation.

I’ve heard at least one person claim they will be building a car body completely out of lead, but I figured I already have plenty of sand around my house, so I plan to fill my car with sand, hence the name “Poundin’ Sand” (some of the runners-up included “Carl Sandburg”, “Sandoval”, “Sandy Bottom”, and “Adam Sandler”, but since “pound sand” sometimes means to engage in a futile activity, I thought it was fitting.

Besides, I’ve already awarded all the style points to Frankie for his belly tanker even though he’s not done yet, come on, just look at it!

Besides the glue to hold it together, the nails to hold the wheels on, and the sand, the rest of my car is 100% laser cut wood. I’m also planning another car that is (nearly) 100% 3D printed plastic. I’ve got some work to do on that yet, though the wheels should be done this week.

(Update: See the completed car.)

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Nerdy Derby

Nerdy Derby

Coming across the Internet via our old pal Matt Richardson is this thing called The Nerdy Derby which is, well, here’s how they describe it:

The Nerdy Derby is a no-rules miniature car building and racing competition inspired by the Cub Scouts’ Pinewood Derby. With a larger, more undulating track and no restrictions on the size of the cars or materials participants can use, the Nerdy Derby rewards creativity, cleverness and ingenuity.

So I thought this was a cool idea, and I think I’ve been able to convince some of the other Milwaukee Makerspace members that’s it a good idea, and we’re planning out first race.

We’re still nailing down the specifics on the track. We may use a standard issue track at first, or meld it with our own modified parts, TBD. Anyway, I’m hoping we can have at least one race on our own, and then we hope to bring it to BarCampMilwaukee7 on October 6th and 7th, 2012.

Car Kit

So start building your cars! And yeah, (almost) anything goes. (As long as it doesn’t damage the track.) Electronics? Cheese? Magnets? Whatever you can come up with.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve built a Pinewood Derby Car, so I thought I should brush up a bit. I ordered a standard kit, just to see it and get the physical dimensions. (And you can get a kit for less than $5.00 or if you want 10, they’ll come out to less than $4.00 per kit.)

But you don’t need a kit… all you need is something that will roll down the track. You got a box of LEGOs? Or something roundish? Go for it.

Axels and Wheels

I ended up getting a bunch of nails that are close enough to the right size, and I plan to try two things: laser cut a bunch of wheels, and 3D print a bunch of wheels. If I can make enough wheels, I’ll supply them to whoever needs them. As for the body of the car, we should have enough scrap wood at the Makerspace to provide plenty of cars.

You want in? Good. We’d love to have you in our race… Details to follow!

See Also: http://wiki.milwaukeemakerspace.org/projects/nerdyderby

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rand(art)

Art #002

In almost all programming languages there’s a function to generate a random number. The random number can then be used to choose a random word, color, shape, etc. In art things are often random, but in specific ways. When drawing, can you really make your hand “randomly” create a line? Isn’t your subconscious always having some effect on the outcome? Short of feeding electric pulses to your muscles to make your arm movements “truly” random, I’m not convinced. (And no, I’m not ready to send live current to my own arms!)

This idea of introducing randomness to the creation of art is something I’ve been doing for a while now. I didn’t really think about it too much, but now I am.

Art #002

The Drawbot I built in 2011 brings this idea of randomness into its operation. The patterns I programmed into it had certain criteria (turn left, go forward, turn left, go backward) but the randomness is in the amount of movement. I like this because even though a device that’s mechanical and electronic should be able to repeat the same thing over and over again (and is sometimes expected to) this doesn’t. It’s also assembled with parts that are nowhere near precision in their movement, which adds more randomness to it all.

The Arc-O-Matic follows a similar concept. The current programming forces it to stick to a preset path (drawing arcs) with no randomness introduced into the code, but again, because of the lack of precision parts swinging around an arm with a pen on it, even when it tries to draw the exact same path, there are variations that cause them to be different each time.

Art #003

Besides the art robots that typically just draw an image, I’ve been experimenting with introducing randomness into the generation of other art, which is starting digital, and will eventually be part of the analog world. I’ve also got a few ideas for interactive digital pieces that will rely on input from the physical world, but still inject randomness into them.

So yeah, that’s sort of what I’ve been working on lately. I should have more to show and talk about in a month or so.

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Still Blogging!

Bloggy

I guess I’m blogging less. Or more. Or something. I don’t know. I am one of those people who tell others they should blog, and I often get depressed when I see some people quit. I’ve been at this since 1997, and yeah, I’m one of those people who can’t not do it.

Jon Udell (who I’ve known online forever) and Tim Bray (who I’ve known online forever) and this Scott guy (who I’ve never heard of, but hey, he’s a blogger) have all been talking about people blogging less.

Am I blogging less? Maybe. It goes it waves. Sometimes I blog more. Sometimes I blog less. Lately I’ve been doing a lot non-web related projects (which is in contrast to a few years ago) and so I spend more time in front of physical thing being assembled instead of in front of a screen and keyboard. Some of the results can be seen on my Projects page.

As for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, yeah, I use them all, but I’m somewhat selective. All three get my blog posts pushed out to them, and I do it manually, customizing the message to each. (I’m against the “blasting” out to other networks, as I often don’t when others do it.)

Google+ gets more of my attention, mainly because I’ve found a great community of RepRap users there, and without sounding insulting, there’s a higher level of conversation there than there is on Facebook. I still check Facebook pretty often, but don’t publish quite as much there. I’m still using Twitter, but I think I tweet a bit less than I used to. (At least with my own personal account.) Of course I also write for a few other blogs too…

In the end though, I’m not too worried about blogging less, as I’m one of those people who can’t not do it.

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Make. Better.

Make Blog

I’m a fan of the Make Blog, and I’m also a user of a 13″ MacBook Pro, and those two things conflict a little bit.

Just take a look at the screen shot above, it’s what I see with a maximized browser window…

Make Blog

I prefer this view, where the footer is hidden, because 98% of the time I’m on the Make site, I don’t need to know whatever the footer has to tell me, and since the footer is locked in place when you scroll, that’s 22 pixels that are always blocking the content. (On an 800 pixel high screen, even losing 22 pixels can hurt.)

I’m using Mozilla Firefox with the Stylish Plugin to do this.

And here’s the code: 

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("blog.makezine.com")
{
        div.new-footer {
                display: none !important;
        }

}

You can do a lot more with Stylish, as it lets you edit any CSS that gets loaded into your browser. Check out userstyles.org for more examples, but if you’re handy with CSS you can write your own little snippets like this for all the web sites that you’d like to improve upon in your daily browsing.