November 2006
Monthly Archive
Mon 13 Nov 2006
ITP students are a rather eager bunch. Not content with just taking classes, the actually teach other classes/workshops called DriveBys as well. Normally they are on Thursday nights, but there is such an excess of keen that they happen on Monday nights now as well.
This Monday, November 12 at 9:15pm at ITP, Nick Sears and myself will teach a drive-by on how to make a printed circuit board for your electronics projects. Moving your circuit to a soldered board will make it much more reliable and rugged than if it stays on a breadboard. Anything you intend to transport or keep running without your continued Tender Loving Care should end up soldered. (Some would say wirewrap is also acceptable, but I’ve never gotten good at that.) Creating a schematic of your circuit will help you create the circuit in the first place and is useful for debugging and communicating your design (for example, to your future self).
We will cover how to create schematics in Eagle PCB, lay out a board and get it fabricated. We will also briefly discuss making your own boards using homebrew techniques, and give an introduction to surface-mount soldering.
Here are some relevant links:
Advanced links:
There should be a video up sometime after the event (thanks Tikva!)
Mon 13 Nov 2006
After creating some crazy wigs out of blue insulation foam through the highly inefficient process of 3D modelling and laser cutting it turned out my wig was too big. So I took out a few panels and cut it down with a Leatherman (to a tolerance of a few thousandths of an inch…. sure). Long live the Foamhawk!
Attaching it to my head was a challenge. I wanted something that would be secure but also have some give for when I (inevitably) collided with something. (It turned out to be the refrigerator door at the deli across the street from school.) The foam didn’t seem like it would take an adhesive very well (either melting or not sticking). In the end I came up with a system where bobby pins were attached to wire held to the foamhawk with screws. Nice and secure, but not too secure, and easily fixable in the field.
Foamhawk pictures (this site)
Foamhawk pictures (Flickr)
Thu 9 Nov 2006
Yesterday my Assistive Technology class visited the Adaptive Design Association in midtown Manhattan. Adaptive Design creates custom equipment for children with disabilities so they can more fully participate in daily life including education and play. A lot of the work they do is creating custom seating. If a child can’t sit properly for extended periods of time it makes it very difficult for them to learn.
ADA primarily uses cardboard as their building material since it is easy to work with, easy to obtain, and fairly durable. Since each piece is basically custom they need to be able to build and adapt quickly. They have developed techniques to give the pieces a finished appearance and you’d hardly guess it was cardboard. ADA is a non-profit and you can get involved and help out!
It’s remarkable how much a difference something built with simple materials and technology can make. The largest cost seems to be the labour — about 2-3 full days are required to build a standard chair. Of course I started thinking using a laser-cutter. They already have an established workflow but it might help for designs that are fairly standard. But the bigger gains are probably to be made from documenting their processes and applying more people in more cities to the problem. Also there are some smaller things that might help within their existing hand-tool approach like larger glue spreaders and jigs for cutting the paper strips that line the cardboard.
ADA site visit pictures (this site)
ADA site visit pictures (Flickr)
Wed 1 Nov 2006
For Halloween my friend Stefan and I decided to go way geeky and make some wigs out of blue foam using the Eyebeam laser cutter. Stefan and Karl have been working on scripts in Maya to automatically divide a 3D surface into profile curves suitable for rapid fabrication so this is proof of concept for ongoing work. It’s also silly. We took digital photos of Stefan’s head from different angles, then imported them into Maya to use as reference for creating a 3D surface. Then Stefan’s script generated the profile curves and we exported them to CorelDraw using the Maya vector renderer. From there we manually tweaked the curves to get the spikes and shapes we want (in future this will be algorithmically driven) and cut them into 1″ blue insulation foam on the laser cutter.
Unfortunately mine didn’t really turn out. I got the scale wrong by about 25% so it was larger than intended. Must have been the foam fumes.
Many thanks to Eyebeam for giving us time on the laser cutter!!
Poly(gon)wig pictures
(Technical notes after the jump.)
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