Category Archives: Art

Halloween projects and Texas

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This week the lab staff is heading off to Austin, Texas, our former stomping grounds and site of the other Maker Faire this year!

As we noted earlier, we’ll be doing a demonstration of how to build an excellent Bat Costume out of an umbrella and a hoodie. However, our primary project there will be our booth: High-Tech Pumpkins, where we will show up to a dozen (fingers crossed) halloween-themed projects, TSA willing. (Thank FSM it’s Austin, not Boston.)

While we get everything together this week, our publishing schedule will be a little wonky. However, halloween is just around the corner, so it’s time to dust off a few projects from our halloween archives!

Headless horseman   
How to hack LEDs into Lego minifigures for Halloween (Link)

 

FSM Costume - 01.jpg   
Make a Flying Spaghetti Monster Costume (Link)

 

   Croc Costume - 10.jpg
Crocodile Costume (Link)

 

Attaching long wires 2   
Easy Itty-Bitty Blinky LED Jack-O’-Lantern (Link)

 

Dalek Body-- under construction   
A Robotic Dalek Pumpkin (Link)

 

See also:

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Pumpkin Spice Truffles

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Truffles

The fall holidays are fantastic ones: Halloween is all about costumes and candy and Thanksgiving is all about food. Here is how to make one of our favorite fall treats: pumpkin spice truffles. (Yum.)

To get the note-perfect flavor of traditional American pumpkin pie, we use the spice ratio from the old-standard can of Libby’s pumpkin (here is the recipe from under the label). Bittersweet chocolate has a stronger flavor than that of pumpkin, so we actually use twice the spice of a pie for a small batch (well, small for us batch) of truffles. The amazing thing is that these pumpkin-free wonders taste uncannily like pumpkin pie. Not that anyone will have trouble distinguishing your truffles and a pie, but you just might get asked, “Are these actually made with pumpkin?”
Continue reading Pumpkin Spice Truffles →

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One Minute Project: Chip Bugs

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Still life with yellow paper (group shot 2)

If you work with electronics, you have probably at some point come across chips that have gone bad. The usual strategies to deal with these include (1) writing “DEAD?” on them in large letters (2) throwing them out, and (3) hiding the evidence. I once heard about a lab student who, whenever he came across a dead chip in his circuit, would dutifully file it back in the drawer with the new chips of that variety– just in case it turned out to be good after all.

Here’s an alternative solution: Turn your chips into Chip Bugs: cute, tiny sculptures that leave no doubt as to which components are which.
Continue reading One Minute Project: Chip Bugs →

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Matt’s awesome chip desk

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What does one do 434 discarded Itanium CPUs? Matt Tovey was inspired by our Chip Trivet, and used them to make this awesome computer desk.

   

The CPU modules were scrapped as the result of a supercomputer upgrade, and were presumably functional before having their heat sinks taken off– a herculean effort for that many CPUs! Matt says that the list price for the lot of chips was over US$800,000 in 2006 and that the desk contains about 2.8 TFLOPs of computing power, about the same
as 900 3.2GHz P4s.

Matt started with a plain desk, tiled in the CPUs, and added wooden edging and a beveled glass top. Nice work!

I just love the way that this desk looks. But it gives me an idea too– take it one step further, and what if it worked? You could use a single, giant PCB for the motherboard which sat underneath the glass surface of the desk. With that much area, you could fit in a lot of processing power. On the cheap (or moderately cheap), one could imagine instead filling the inside of a desk top with low-cost (even last-generation) PC motherboards to make a great looking beowulf cluster or render farm that doesn’t take up any desktop or rack-mount space.

Sadly, Matt’s page has moved on to the great /dev/null in the sky, but the mirror still shows some of the build photos.

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Quiltbert: a Q*bert Quilt

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Lap quilt

QuiltBert is based on the traditional tumbling blocks pattern and the video game Q*bert. It is a lap-sized quilt, ideal for hanging out on the couch playing vintage video games.

A while back, our junior mad scientist brought home a geometry / art assignment from school based on designing a quilt. The kids were given a small grid which they filled in with a pattern. They then rotated and copied the pattern several times into a larger grid. His design looked like it would be very complicated to make into a real quilt, with curved pieces, applique and embroidery all needed.

That started us all looking at quilt patterns so he could get an idea of what goes into making a quilt. When we found the “tumbling blocks” quilts which are made with rhombi the question came up as to whether anyone had ever made a Q*bert quilt.

Although there are many tumbling block quilts that are referred to as Q*bert quilts, we couldn’t find any genuine Q*bert quilts. We did find Tetris, Space Invaders, and Mario, Mario, Mario, and more Mario. Also the tangentially related but incredibly inspired Color Bars quilt. Clearly, someone needed to make a real Q*bert quilt.
Continue reading Quiltbert: a Q*bert Quilt →

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CandyFab @ Dorkbot: 8/15/07 @ TechShop

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symmetric view 2

On Wednesday, August 15 we’ll be giving a presentation about CandyFab at a meeting of Dorkbot SF, our local spinoff of
Dorkbot NYC.

Dorkbot chapters organize monthly talks and events for artists, scientists, and engineers centered around the theme of “the creative use of electricity.”

The meeting will be held at 7:30 PM at TechShop, a San Francisco Bay Area “open-access public workshop,” located just off of 101 in Menlo Park, where you can go use a wide range of tools and machines to make things. We’ll be bringing the CandyFab machine along, and– if everything goes right– demonstrating its use. So if you’re in the SF bay area, this is a great chance to come and take a close look at the CandyFab 4000, smell the caramel, and ask questions. Besides our talk and demo, there will be a couple of shorter presentations on other dorkbot-ish topics, and an introduction to TechShop. (Tours of Techshop will be available at the end of the meeting as well.)

Everyone is welcome to come to the meeting; there is a $5 suggested donation for the venue at the door.

[Link] See you there!

UPDATE: The event was great! (Read more here.)

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More circuitry snacks

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cookies1

cookies4   cookies3

My old friend Kevin sent in these pictures of a massive array of tasty electronic treats that he and his family made for a group picnic at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Nice work!) If your diet is short on precision op-amps and instrumentation amplifiers, these just might hit the spot.

You can read our own article about circuitry snacks (dated July 11, 2007) here.

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Printing complex shapes: A sugar chain

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Sugar Chain We made this chain of twelve giant links on the CandyFab 4000 to demonstrate the fabrication of a complex object, the sort that is difficult to make by conventional machining processes. You can see the 3D model and some build pictures for this monstrosity over at CandyFab.org.

This object also highlights the relatively large build envelope of the CandyFab– significantly larger than that of most other low end (i.e., under $50k) 3D fabrication systems.

PS for Chemistry geeks: insert joke about long-chain hydrocarbons here.

 

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Another Flying Spaghetti Monster sighting

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FSM: haribo sour s'ghetti

It would seem that the Flying Spaghetti Monster has seen fit to bless this bag of Haribo “Sour S’ghetti” with his noodly presence. (Ramen.)

We came across this while working on the Circuitry Snacks project– they were one of the candidates that we originally thought might be good to serve as edible “wires.” Go figure.

[Related: FSM Costume, FSM Toast]

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