General Stuff

Me talking about robot things.

General Stuff

My PATREON for World Domination

So, I launched a PATREON page today. O_O …I feel as though it was done sort of on a whim. I signed up on the Patreon site Sunday night, and I’m already rolling this thing out, video and all… just four days later. crazy! If you don’t know what Patron is or how it works, it’s basically a crowd funding platform like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, accept… its purpose is for content creators to raise a monthly income from their supporters instead of one larger lump sum. Where it is less appropriate for launching big projects or bringing products to market, it’s great for writers, artists, and makers who could use some support from their followers to take their passion to the next level. I learned about Patreon when my favorite webcomic artist launched his campaign back a few months ago. His was quite successful and resulted in freeing him up to pretty much draw on stuff all the…

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Making an Anaglyph!

You know those cool images that become 3D when you put on the spiffy red and cyan glasses? This weekend I accidentally learned how to make them! They’re actually ridiculously simple to create… and extremely fun to layout once you get the hang of it! I was adding the finishing touches to the next page of my webcomic. The subject needed to appear “glitchy” so I decided to mess with the registration of the RGB channels. Sure enough, this produced the appropriate effect I was going for. By shifting the channel registers, I was trying to produce an anaglyph style, but I had no intention of the effect actually working. After all, I assumed those nifty dizzying images were hard as hell to make. Out of our shared desire to figure out how things work, Mark dug up a pair of 3D glasses and we started fussing with the channel layers. As I shifted…

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The Thing You Follow Without Trying

I’ve always wanted to produce a graphic novel, but I’ve tried and failed to keep the momentum up numerous times throughout my life. ITS FRAKKEN HARD. I’m not the best at drawing, but I like doing it… and at this point I’m good enough that I can crank out images without fussing over them too much. So I’m giving it a go once more. The story I’ve chosen to tell is a cracked-out trip of an autobiography. It’s about the important events of my life, told through the dreams I had at those particular times. This is all mapped over a set of characters I’ve been drawing forever who live in a post-human word. It doesn’t make much sense unless you remember to think of everything as a metaphor… much like interpreting dreams, right? For an additional layer of fun, I’ve only started illustrations after my second cocktail of the evening. This works to keep the storytelling honest while preventing…

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Pinhole Day

I would like you to meet “crappy box” : Without ritual, life lacks meaning. Whether it be a drink every evening at 5 to celebrate the day conquered, or watching the playoffs each season to show pride for your hometown… the little things we assign significance to reward us with moments of privately observed fulfillment. The last Sunday of April each year is World-Wide Pinhole Photography Day. On this one day, people take strange, unique and beautiful pictures with hand-made cameras and then submit one to an online gallery archive. When you think about it… this is a pretty frikkin awesome thing. Somehow every April thousands of people all over the world remember to try out their newest pinhole creation or photographic technique and then upload a single image to represent an idea from their life on that day. It’s a collaborative snapshot of the world as a whole, and its become one of my life rituals. I should probably mention…

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Robot Army : Less Than a Week Away

So the video above condenses a whole weekends worth of work into ten minutes. In the beginning we don’t have anything flashed or calibrated… and the arms aren’t even installed yet on the newer robots. By Sunday night all three pallets worth are working in sync and are ready to be fine tuned. As it’s Monday, I’m straightening out kinks now so that we have as smooth a time as possible once we arrive in San Mateo. Mark is required to work at Blue Man all week up until we leave, so he had to grind out the majority of the code/networking related stuff over the past three days so it’d all be done by now. We’re still flashing them with tweaks to the delta math which effect their range of motion… still working on a solution for the LED cables being a hair too short… still trying to get answers from…

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So, I won a tablet…

Two weeks ago Mark and I attended the Atmel Tech on Tour seminar. This was my first time going to one of their events like this, so I didn’t know what to expect. The exercises brought back memories of being in my first electronics class in college, which also happened to be a grad level course I had no business being enrolled in. It felt sort of like I was drowning the whole time, but Mark was there to fish me out of any confusion I had while trying to navigate their massive programming platform. At some point before the lunch break our teacher… ugh…. person giving the talk (who thought I was Mark’s ‘secretary’), informed us that Atmel was holding a sweepstakes for a Galaxy tablet which you could enter by submitting a selfie taken with the Atmel trailer in the background. Sweet! I may not be able to program very well, but I can take a picture with my…

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Robot Army : Las Vegas Mini Maker Faire

I started composing an update a week ago… and never finished it. Now Mini Maker Faire is over. Oh well. In any case… back then everything felt like it was falling apart. I wrote venting about how terrified, annoyed and disappointed I was that things wouldn’t just go the way they were suppose to. As we encountered one complication after another, each bump yielded an even better solution than what we were originally planning. Long story short, all is going great again. Better in fact. We had an excellent Mini Maker Faire on Saturday. All of our friends and local backers came to see our kids perform and talk to us about our maniacal future schemes. Though we brought a soldering station and work lamp just in case an all systems failure occurred… nothing went wrong. Everything just worked…. the whole time (aside from the stupid Processing app crashing every now and…

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Bunny Slippers of Death

My birthday was this past week and Mark made me something so frekkin awesome that I had to write a post to share it. First of all, we all know gifts that are made are far better than gifts which are bought. Gifts are even better still when they were made with inspiration from something you did… in this case, a drawing I made that Mark pulled into reality with his craftsman/techie prowess! BEHOLD. Bunny feet of death : Mark collaborated on these with his awesomely talented friend from work, Emily Wiersma… who designed the ears, which she engineered to stand up and hold their shape when worn, as well as the adorable bunny faces! Mark created the eyes, which are 3D printed compartments that hold both a power supply and tiny SMT LED! I drew these almost a year ago back when I first started planning the Robot Army…

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Robot Army : Entering Phase 3

Fremont Street Procession To celebrate our first successful Kickstarter campaign, Mark and I threw a soiree at SYN Shop with our close friends. Much to our surprise, everyone brought liquor! Nerds drink? Heh. Once good and numb they toted me down Fremont Street with one of my robots in a royal procession on our friend Bill’s newly crafted dolly. I can’t believe this happened… the experience was surreal (Thank you guys for making me feel special!). The video explains the night better than I can : The War Room No one can mastermind a scheme for world domination without a proper war room to do it all in. During this first week since the end of our Kickstarter, we’ve transformed Mark’s workspace into a factory. We fashioned a 4′ x 8′ sheet of wood into a painted, polished table complete with central two tier hutch and power outlets (oh, and speakers of…