arduino

Light Play

Delta Robot Completed : Jeden

My neon yellow filament came in the mail finally! So last Saturday I monopolized the 3D printer at SYN Shop and made six new florescent arms to replace the grey and nasty transparent ones on my delta prototype. I also recut the robot’s base using some 1/4 inch acrylic, complete with name, signature, and project title etched along the edges. With the prototype upgraded, Jeden is now the first official addition to Light Play… and he’s a looker : Having figured all that out… it’s time to do the next step: Make about a hundred more. Alas, I am here at the hackerspace hoarding the Replicator 2, this time during off hours so I don’t get the reputation of an equipment hog. So far I’ve printed another set of parts and assembled a second robot making use of some old donated servos. I’m testing it out now to see if…

Light Play

3D Printed Delta Prototype : Jeden

The last working delta robot I created was completed last August, nearly six months ago. I didn’t have access to a metal shop, so I relied on my dremel to do all the work and because of this it was made entirely out of hangers and tupperware. I hacked a multitude of plastic household objects and to-go boxes into actual moving robots… which was how I had expected to create the whole army of such deltas. That is until I met everyone at the budding hackerspace last summer and learned that 3D printers are now desktop sized. I’ve come a long way since then. Now having figured out how to make 3D models of the parts I need, I’m printing my robots like a more civilized maker. I’ve also departed from relying on hobby parts for the joints due to my friend Mark’s ingenious idea to implement ball bearings into…

Goggles

Theremin Goggles

Blinking, fading, and color changing lights are a standard for eye catching goggles. This being said, I decided to change it up a bit and make a set that would engage the wearer in the production of sound. As always I wanted my goggles to be interactive. When it comes to audio, I figured there was no better way to achieve this than with some sort of theremin which would invoke hand waving and finger wiggling from the wearer and anyone near by. Now, I realize that traditional theremins are quite complex in their inner workings and tend to run quite large, so I poked around the internet until I found this simplified optical theremin that requires a hand full of basic components and two 555 timers.This particular design also creates a very unique, annoying sound which in this application is perfect! Here is the link to the circuit I…

Goggles

Reactor Goggles

I was searching through DIY project ideas when I found an instructable on how to make an Arc Reactor from misc plastic pieces (Make an Iron Man Arc Reactor). The coiled wire and blue lights were so appealing to look at that I decided to give the new laser cutter down at the hackerspace a try and make a set of lenses that looked like mini ‘reactors’. My color scheme this time was going to be black and neon yellow (my favorite color) which I thought the blue LEDs would complement quite nicely…. It took no time to design the shapes for the lenses in illustrator and manifest the acrylic into two layers that once stacked, gave some depth to the radial design: In itself this looked pretty cool but I still needed to wrap magnet wire around the thin sections of the left most lens. I also needed to…