The Vintage Computer Festival is happening at the Computer History Museum in Mountain view this weekend, August 6-7.
Hands-on exhibits are presented Saturday and Sunday. You’ll find demos of 1960s minicomputers, 1970s homebrew systems, 1980s eight-bitters, and a few oddities. Some exhibits contain pristine original machines, while others focus on unique modern hacks, and everything in between.
The MOnSter 6502 will be there, too!
plotter vids as a service. pic.twitter.com/S0o0bUwe0s
— anders hoff (@inconvergent) July 21, 2016
We’re excited to see so many people sharing what they are doing with the AxiDraw. Here are a few examples we’ve found in places like twitter and instagram.
We’re going back to pen and paper with our logo, with a little help from the EvilMadScientist #Axidraw. A video posted by Spies & Assassins (@spiesassassins) on
Spies & Assassins have been trying out different writing implements.
NO/R has been trying materials like leather (above) and canvas.
#envelope #casualcalligraphy #axidraw #wedding #invitation #jimandpamforever A photo posted by Bonnie Kingdon (@penandletter) on
Bonnie Kingdon posted this elegantly addressed envelope.
Adam Sontag posted several marker drawings on foil.
#axidraw pen plotter + stipple gen + moon photos = #win (thx to @joanielemercier for the inspiration :) pic.twitter.com/HrfvS22HSs — Moritz Stefaner (@moritz_stefaner) July 9, 2016
Moritz Stefaner discovered StippleGen, our stippling program.
Miki is using AxiDraw to create custom packaging.
Keep all these great pictures and videos coming! We always enjoy seeing the creative ways people use our tools.
To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, we’re having an open house tomorrow!
When: Thursday, July 21, 5 pm ? 9 pm
Where: Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
175 San Lazaro Ave, Suite 150
Sunnyvale, CA, 94086
Please come help us celebrate, meet Zener the cat, and share in food and conversation.
The winners of the 2016 Adafruit Dronies have been announced! A couple of my favorites, like Droneboy above, made it to the top, and the entries ranged from funny to dizzying to beautiful. Head over and check out the winners– the videos provide an interesting example set of how drones are being used as a creative filmmaking tool. Thank you to all of the entries. It was an honor to help judge!
Nixin is a font being kickstarted by Nelio Barros inspired by our Nixie tube take-apart post.
Simply put, the original nixie tubes are beautiful and retro. They bring us the spirit of an era where technology often looked like magic.
Nixin is based on the original 9 numbers that are exactly the same as can be found inside the nixie tubes, and all the other characters are my interpretation to what they would look like, if they existed inside a tube.
Here’s one of our photos he used in the video to talk about the inspiration behind the font:
The campaign ends in a few days, so act quickly to support the project!
MakerBlock is exploring paper circuits, and has published a roundup of articles, including our Single Sided Circuit Board, Electric Origami, and Edge-Lit cards.
While I’m a big fan of paper and circuits, I’ve never really given paper circuits/circuitry a shot. Unfortunately, I have no good excuse for this. (Fair warning: I’ve been collecting links and ideas on this topic for several weeks now, and even though I intend to break up the post into more manageable chunks, I have a feeling this is going to be a doozy) …
This week for the National Week of Making, the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium is celebrating with a WaterColorBot and Beetleblocks workshop.
WaterColorBot always brings unexpectedness and whimsicality to your design. Here, getting the outcome does not become the end of your project. You feel you want to try more. Whether it is revising the code, tweaking the WaterColorBot setting, or replacing the brush, you are making a small but important adjustment for you. You find yourself in an eternal loop of iteration!
We recently found out about a project to make custom printed tennis balls for an event in Sweden last year.
The first challenge was finding a way to print on round surfaces. Luckily, in our previous R&D experiments, we had played the with quirky EggBot, a printer that lets you print on eggs (yeah, you read that right). We knew that, with some work, it was possible to use that mechanism to print on a “normal” round object too. The Eggbot producers did not agree, stating on their official wiki:
“No matter what you do, EggBot will never produce good results on a tennis ball. Golf balls are okay, though.”
But those words only fueled our creativity and made us move forward.
They 3D printed some custom couplers to hold the tennis balls and wrote some custom software to streamline the printing process, and then printed on hundreds of tennis balls.
We’ve since updated the wiki.
Bob M. shared this video of his project:
I used your Larson Scanner with 10 mm LEDs to put a little life into my Cylon “standee” which stands guard over my office. It has delighted everyone in the office (especially the IT Guys that work for me).
