RasterWeb![ oh shit, blip.tv shut down :( ]
Our old pal Time Lapse Bot is back! And this time he visited Bucketworks for Spring Gallery Night 2012. Watch as the guys from Milwaukee Makerspace wow the crowd with their amazing making skills…
You can also view this video at blip.tv. The musical soundtrack is “Bogi Beat Budapest” by Budapest BluesBoy (feat. Church Choir Sv. Troica – furkosbot – presserror) and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License.
Last year my youngest daughter took up the trumpet, and shortly after she started she managed to get the mouthpiece stuck. This is pretty common, from what people in the know tell me. The problem is, the school used to have a mouthpiece removing tool, but it either broke, or it no longer has it, which means I had to take it in to the music store, get a loaner, wait for the repair, and then go pick it up and return the loaner… Hassle!
Pictured below is what a mouthpiece puller looks like. There’s also a more tooly/clampy version, which is the only kind I had seen at the time.
The commercial version is $40 USD, and while taking her trumpet in for repairs is a pain, it’s free since we are on a rental agreement (for now anyway.)
After she got the mouthpiece stuck a second time (!?!?) I wondered if I could make my own tool, and it turns out I could.
It actually looks very similar to the commercial version above, even though I didn’t see that one until I started writing this post. I was using screws between wood for another project that needed an adjustable platform, and I borrowed the concept for this.
I originally put calipers on the mouthpiece to get the right size, and then drilled holes into the two pieces of scrap bamboo I had. At that point the project sat dormant, waiting for the mouthpiece to get stuck again… which it did a few days ago.
I ended up making some very inelegant rough cuts into the bamboo with my jigsaw, and got it so the thing would slide into place semi-tightly, and then started turning the wing-nuts to apply pressure and force the mouthpiece off. It was tricky! I didn’t want to apply too much (I am not a professional band instrument fixer!) but when I thought it was all the way, I tried twisting it slightly. I don’t think twisting it works at all, and in fact I think it’s the wrong thing to do, because of the possibility of damaging the instrument. (Again, I am not a professional!) So with just a little more turning of the wing-nuts, it popped off!
I was quite pleased, as this meant I didn’t have to make two trips to the music store, and my daughter would have a trumpet she could put back into the case again.
Two more things… If I designed a trumpet case, I’d add some sort of special door to the side so you can put the damn thing in the case when the mouthpiece is stuck. I know this might encourage people to not take out the mouthpiece, but it’s no fun carrying around a trumpet with a stuck mouthpiece and the case it won’t fit into.
The other thing… Every school that has a band program should have one of these. Heck, if there are at least 3 other kids playing trumpet, I’d see if they could all pony up $10 each to supply the school with one. Even if a band director couldn’t remove it every time, it would be a good first line of defense.
Once again Gallery Night was a blast… This time myself and the Milwaukee Makerspace guys joined forces with Bucketworks and showed the art-lovers of Milwaukee what we do. (Make things!)
Since both Drawbots were busy at the Art Milwaukee Wedding event, I needed something new to show. (And yes, I did say “both” because there are now two rolling drawbots.)
Anyway, I saw this blog post over a year ago, and made a mental note to explore the idea more, and I did, and the result is the Arc-O-Matic: a robotic drawing arm that makes arcs. Well, that’s basically what it does at this point. See the Arc-O-Matic project page for all the details.
People seem to really like seeing machines that draw, which means I’ll probably keep on exploring the world of art robots.
File Under: FUN.
(Also, if anyone knows who I can talk to at Sharpie about a sponsorship, I’d appreciate it!)
I made some wooden knuckles. Why wood? Well, brass knuckles are usually made out of brass, which is a hard metal, and may hurt someone. Wooden knuckles use wood instead, and shouldn’t be as harmful, or dangerous, or heavy. Also, I may have a history of making safe/odd weapons.
I also published this on Thingiverse, which means if you’ve got access to a laser cutter or are really handy saw, you can make your own. It’s derived from 3D printable “brass” knuckles which would look lovely in glow-in-the-dark ABS plastic.
These may or may not be something you want to take through security. I mean, they are definitely not metal, so they won’t set off any metal detectors, and really, they are more “art” than “weapon” in my opinion. (I have no idea what the TSA might think about these…)
If you want to make your own laser-cut wooden knuckles, you could probably do so at the Milwaukee Makerspace if you were a member, and had some 3mm Baltic Birch plywood and a bit of glue.
And people wonder why I complain so much about date formatting… (See Also: raster’s rants on 4-digit years.)
Take this example from Nikon’s web site, captured lovingly in the screen shot above.
If you’re in a hurry, and don’t have time to read everything (I hear that covers 75% of the people who use the Internet) you might need info on the D4 and see that it’s at the top of the list, and hey… looks like it was updated December 4, 2010! At least that may be your assumption by seeing 12/04/10.
You also need info on the D40, and you see 08/04/04 and think “Wow, it was last updated in 2004!” which is weird, because the D40 didn’t come out until 2006. (And yeah, the D4 wasn’t around in 2010 either.)
If you scan the whole column, you’ll see that first part of the date is the year, followed by the month, and then the day. While I do prefer year, month, day, I definitely prefer YYYY-MM-DD.
This isn’t 1975, you’re not saving vast amounts of computer memory by typing “08” instead of “2008” and all your really doing is creating opportunities for people to get confused.
Yes, I know people should actually read things in a critical fashion especially if it has to do with an SDK for hardware, but this is just one example of many.