Our friend Schuyler St. Leger added a vintage telephone bell to his Alpha Clock Five to make an alarm clock that could wake the dead— or at least a teenage boy who’s been watching late night TV.
Category Archives: Engineering
Citizen Science: How Big is a Bird Egg?
While talking about egg sizes in the context of the Eggbot project, we realized that while we have access to a few samples, we do not have a good understanding of the normal variation in the sizes of various bird eggs.
The sizes of chicken eggs are well understood and well regulated, but for other types of bird eggs (like the emu egg above) the sizes are not necessarily so standard. If you have access to other types of eggs or eggshells, we’d like your help in gathering data about the size and variation in these other types of eggs.
We’ve set up a survey form to collect egg size data and we plan to post about our results once we have collected enough data.
Thank you!
555 footstool in the wild
This newly minted (date code: 1403) 555 footstool comes to us via Martin on Twitter, who writes:
My 555 footstools arrived. Build by my father-in-law, based on design files from @EMSL
Here are our original project post and our design. This is the first time that we’ve seen someone else build one based on our design. Nice!
WaterColorBot with Lasers
Via @programmer1200 on twitter, “…adding a microswitch and an @arduino in preparation for a laser addition.” We’ll be keeping our eyes on this WaterColorBot!
Hackerspace Field Trip
From the Lenoir News-Topic, middle school students got to build Egg-Bot derivatives at their local hackerspace:
“I think this is one of the best field trips I’ve ever been on,” one of the sixth-graders said, unprompted by any of the adults (or reporters) in the room. “This one, you actually build something.”
Doc Pop’s Destroy All Presets
Our friend Doc Pop is running a kickstarter campaign for his new album Destroy All Presets to release it on a special edition Gameboy Advance cartridge. Even if you don’t back his campaign, the video, with its retro-style album ad, is definitely worth watching!
Wolfram Conference Eggbot Challenge
Over on the Wolfram Blog, they’ve posted the winners to the Wolfram Technology Conference Egg-Bot Challenge:
We have a programming competition every year at the Wolfram Technology Conference, which in past years was the Mathematica One-Liner Competition. This year we held the Egg-Bot Challenge, a change of pace to give attendees a chance to exercise their graphics skills. The idea of the competition was to use Mathematica to generate designs that could be plotted on spheres…
Above is first place winner Jan ?íha’s composition of sinusoidal motifs, and below is second place winner Michael Sollami’s spirograph designs. Head over to see the rest of the entries.
DIY Electric Kistka for Eggbot
Ann posted instructions in our forums for creating an electric kistka (wax pen) for the Eggbot for traditional Pysanky egg dying techniques. She used nichrome wire, krylon tape, a modified kistka, and a 2xAA battery holder with a switch and described how to mount it in the Eggbot. She posted a couple of designs to Thingiverse demonstrating the technique including the rose design pictured above.
For a Humpty Dumpty design, she wrote up how she made it:
Using eggbot and custom electric kistka, plotted the Humpty Dumpty picture and text on an egg. First plotted outline, dyed brick, colored in bricks by hand with kistka, dyed blue.
You can check out her other designs for the Eggbot on Thingiverse.
LED Kitchen Timer
Dave wrote in to tell us about the kitchen timer he made:
I just wanted to say thank you for putting together such a great site and set of products. I’m a newbie and after about 4 months o studying your articles and using the Diavolino as my development board, was able to make a cool little kitchen timer for my parents this Christmas. I definitely could not have done it without your articles and products.
He documented the project with a series of videos (youtube playlist) showing his progression through building it. Shown above is the breadboarded prototype next to the finished timer.
Thanks for sharing your project photos and videos, Dave!
WaterColorBot Pen Art
Ryan Lane posted a couple of short videos of the WaterColorBot drawing a Storm Trooper and Seattle with markers. He traced a photo of the Storm Trooper and applied a half-tone filter before plotting with the WaterColorBot.
