Neon Scope

It’s so hard for me to clean up my office. I’ll see a random collection of objects that I’m supposed to be sorting, putting away, and/or throwing in the garbage.. and I can’t help playing with them instead. This time the objects in question were an old CCFL backlight inverter, a neon flicker-flame bulb, and a linear table from a discarded flatbed scanner. These... Read More

Cheap and easy Android to Propeller bridge

This is a quick plug for a spiffy project that M. K. Borri (spiritplumber) has been building using my usb-fs-host object. He’s connecting an Android phone to a Propeller microcontroller, emulating the ADB debug protocol on the µC, and using this as a communication bridge in order to control robots from the phone. He has a video to demonstrate his progress: This project... Read More

S/PDIF Digital Audio on a Microcontroller

A few years ago, I implemented an S/PDIF encoder object for the Parallax Propeller. When I first wrote this object, I wrote only a very terse blog post on the subject. I rather like the simplicity and effectiveness of this project, so I thought I’d write a more detailed explanation for anyone who’s curious about the gritty details. This is a recent video by Nick at... Read More

Cube64 GameCube to N64 Adaptor

Enjoy retro N64 games, but can’t stand the controller? That’s the situation I found myself in about 7 years ago, back in 2004. So I built an adaptor, to use Game Cube controllers on the N64. (tl;dr… Cube64-DX on Google Code) The adaptor hardware is very simple- all you need is a PIC microcontroller. I originally designed the project to work with the very popular... Read More

Perler Bead Robot Ideas

This was originally going to be a comment response to Tim’s blog entry, Scanlime’s Perler Bead Hopper Sorting Suggestion: I was looking at Scanlime’s 3D Printed Vibrating Perler Bead Hopper: [video] and I was thinking how best to sort out the different color beads. I thought that if scanlime used one main hopper with the color sensor ([photo] & [sparkfun]) and one... Read More

Trying out the Avago ADJD-S371-Q999 Color Sensor

This is another sub-experiment leading up to a project that I’ve only tangentially mentioned on this blog so far: a robot that automatically sorts and places Perler Beads. The robot starts with a pile of unsorted beads, and after it separates them into single beads, it needs a way to accurately sense the color of each individual bead. I thought I’d try out the Avago... Read More

Trying out Skeinforge Support Material

This is a quick photoblog and a video to document my first experience with using the support material options in Skeinforge. This was on my Makerbot Thing-o-Matic with a MakerGear stepper extruder, 0.35mm nozzle, and aluminum/kapton heated build platform. The model I’m printing is Yoshi, the familiar Nintendo character. I cleaned up and subdivided the original low-poly model... Read More

MakerBot Protip: Build from SD card without a PC

If you’ve ever wanted to build a model on your MakerBot without a PC attached at all (or perhaps you just never have a USB cable quite long enough to reach…) there’s an easy solution! This is a quick one-line addition to the V2 MakerBot motherboard firmware. With this change, your MakerBot will start up normally unless there’s an “autoexec.s3g”... Read More

MakerBot Upgrades

A few add-ons for my MakerBot: New build surface, sheet aluminum and hot Kapton. MakerGear Stepper Extruder, currently using the 0.35mm nozzle Running the latest firmware and ReplicatorG from git, with the MK6 Stepper Plastruder support Using the Skeinforge Reversal plugin. Say goodbye, Comb and Oozebane. Printed around-the-nozzle cooling ring (Video on YouTube)  Read More

Getting to know the Thing-O-Matic

This post is mostly an apology for not having done anything blog-worthy in the past few months. As usual, life has been full of Things. Like Katamari Damacy. Kinda. On the technical side, I’ve had a few interesting ideas bouncing around in my head lately: 3D Printing. Seems like a space ripe for DIY innovation, and besides, it’s really cool. Other sorts of odd CNC machines.... Read More