Projects – Page 6 – ROBOHEMIAN

Light Play

Robot Army : Family Photos

May 29, 2014spetku0 Comments

While waiting for parts and components to funnel our way, Mark and I got around to taking some promotional photos of our brood. We have these 30 cool robots and soon enough we hope to start displaying them around town. Getting the word out about them is a must, and nothing conveys the idea of a dancing field of light wielding minions better than long exposure shots like these! I can’t wait until all 200 of them are built and dancing. ^.^ To see the whole album visit here : Long Exposure Shoot Maybe we’ll try getting them to spell out words… =o

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Robot Army : Maker Faire

May 22, 2014spetku0 Comments

Mark and I rolled into Vegas yesterday right before the sun started to bow out of the sky. We stopped at Chipotle and picked up some over-stuffed puppy bags to push into our faces with beer upon finally returning to the house we left in pieces a week earlier. It felt like we had survived the apocalypse. After that ice-cold Carona we untethered everything from the clump in the back of Mark’s Kia and began dragging things into the house where they belonged. Once all three pallets of robots made it onto the table we both collapsed on the couch and giggled in delirious exhaustion. Maker Faire was exactly like it was last year; bursting with stimuli. The visuals were nonstop, even being trapped in our booth the whole time… which was right next to the bleeding stage Arc Attack performs on. I don’t care for tesla coils. They’re cool, but I don’t…

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Robot Army : All Systems GO!

May 13, 2014spetku0 Comments

Ok, ok… I’m done lamenting about the late nights. They work… I’m happy. Time for a beer and some heavy hype building. Share this with your friends and stop by our booth at Maker Faire if you plan to be there. =] Robot Army FTW

General Stuff

Robot Army : Less Than a Week Away

May 12, 2014spetku0 Comments

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…

Fifth Element Mood Stones

Elemental Mood Lighting : Just Add Love

April 28, 2014spetku7 Comments

We probably shouldn’t have taken on this side project amidst all the pressure to prepare on time for our display at Maker Faire, however I’m glad we have this awesome life relic to show for it! Since my last update, I took the four complete 3D printed stones and gave their surface a rather sharp makeover. All those years in art school came in handy again. It surprises me just how many techies have never heard of gesso … so I’m tapping this apparent art secret for the sake of painting on an otherwise stubborn surface. ABS will take acrylic paint, however instead of priming it with anything you might get from Home Depot in the paint section… you can go to Blick and grab a pint of clear gesso (canvas primer). It may be a little more expensive, but it’s less volatile, doesn’t have any fumes, and has the best tooth when…

Fifth Element Mood Stones

Elemental Mood Lighting : The Moving Bits

April 23, 2014spetku4 Comments

First I have to show off how nicely the prints turned out! Some of these larger pieces were printed over night for nine-hour periods and were completed without fail (which is surprising). In the morning there would be a loaf of stone sitting on the printer bed : Mark is responsible for creating these seamless linear designs on the face of the stones : We ran out of natural filament by the time we got to the ‘wind’ stone, so it’s in a silver/gray color instead. This one was printed last because unlike the other three stones, its design is on the upper portion which overlaps the wedge pieces that pop out. It called for a little more fuss and planning when designed : Over all, I’m extremely pleased with how they look so far. I can’t wait to paint them though….! I spent most of this past weekend getting the mechanical parts in…

Fifth Element Mood Stones

Fifth Element Stone Mood Lighting

April 15, 2014spetku3 Comments

Now that we’ve ordered all of our bits, pieces, nics, knacks, and parts for Maker Faire… Mark and I are left with a brief lull while we wait for things to show up. Instead of relaxing, we decided to do a ‘weekend’ project to fill the time. The Sci-fi contest Hackaday is holding right now seemed like the perfect thing to overt our attention to, yet keep us sharp and in our maker headspace. As such… we’ve chosen to make a sic-fi themed prop from my personal favorite sci-fi, The Fifth Element. This same article can be found on my hackaday.io page for this project here : The Earth Stone First of all, if you haven’t seen The Fifth Element, all you need to know is that we’re making replicas of these fancy things below which will operate with mechanical and electrical parts instead of spooky earth magic like in the movie =] Mark and I decided that regardless…

General Stuff

Robot Army : Las Vegas Mini Maker Faire

April 8, 2014spetku0 Comments

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…

Light Play

Robot Army : Printing + Drinking

March 20, 2014spetku2 Comments

Nitrogen Capsules = LED Diffusers Here’s a St. Patricks Day story for those of you who are into that sort of thing. As you might have gathered, Mark and I like to drink beer while we work. Lately our brew of choice has been Guinness. We’ve been so busy now that we’re in fulfillment mode that we’ve neglected to haul our empty beer cans from the past two or three weeks to the curb. There is a mound of them piled in the corner of the kitchen waiting to be tripped over. In short, we haven’t had any luck finding a more reasonably priced lens to go over the LED of our robots. The one we had found, though perfect in size and shape is freakishly expensive (We’re talking several times more than the amount we allocated for that part on our BOM). We had given up on finding a…

General Stuff

Robot Army : Entering Phase 3

March 9, 2014spetku0 Comments

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…