HEXceramic posted examples of using StippleGen to create lasered molds for making ceramic tiles. Very cool!
From the mailbag: Sciencey!
Dave wrote in about the EggBot:
My daughter wanted to tell you that she loves your creation. The other day she told me that she is more sciencey than girly, and I told her that she could be both. I have attached a picture of her with her first multi color print, Wonder Woman.
Thank you for sharing, and the egg turned out great!
Linkdump: March 2017
- morejpeg: Another microservice that you didn’t know you needed
- The Backyard Scientist: Pouring Molten salt into Water (YouTube)
- Did Voyager 1 capture an image of Enceladus’ plumes erupting?
- If the moon were one pixel
- Digital Clock in Conway’s Game of Life
- Make your own landed Falcon 9 model
- A Vector Field Playground
- Using a CNC mill to open a case of beer.
- 74181 ALU chip: how it works and why it’s so strange
- Classic Game Postmortem: Oregon Trail (YouTube)
- Original songs sampled by Daft Punk
- Scientific studies suggest that cats are nice.
Using the AxiDraw for Mouse Testing
The folks at Mouse-Sensitivity.com used the AxiDraw to do a mouse sensor accuracy test, comparing the Logitech G900, G700s, and G9X (and a cheap HP they had on hand). The resulting visualization of the sensor information is fascinating!
Linkdump: February 2017
- Boris Karloff’s Guacamole Recipe
- Can you fake a TV Remote control with paper and a lighter? Probably not.
- EL wire Nixie Tube
- CatterPlots: Scatter plots, with cats as points
- Convert Inkscape SVG drawings to KiCad footprints
- Double pendulum with UV LED & GITD backdrop (Youtube)
- The Rotating Hallway Scene from 2001, stabilized
- A review of science books for kids, on pages 4-5 of the Reno News & Review Family Guide 2017 including The Annotated Build It Yourself Science Laboratory
- What’s in that Subway Oven Roasted Chicken Sandwich?
Evil Mad Scientist Valentines: 2017 Edition
Today we are releasing our newest set of “Download and Print” cards for Valentine’s day. This is our fifth year, and fifth set of cards: The 2013 set had six equation-heavy cards, the 2014 set was a set of six symbol-heavy cards, and the 2015 set included love, hearts, and arrows. The 2016 set featured Pluto’s cold heart, and the perfect card for your robotic expression of love.
This year’s set features relativity, atomic orbitals, exponential growth, an LC resonator, and an epsilon delta declaration of love.
“You put me in an excited state.”
Roses are red. Which does suggest that they’re moving away from us, quickly.
While this sounds much like an “epsilon delta proof,” it lacks the logical rigor that we would normally associate with one. It’s more of a postulate, really.
“You make my heart feel like sin(1/x)….” If your heart isn’t jumping yet, you’ve probably never tried to graph that.
The original title for this one was “my love for you grows exponentially.” But hey, your valentine is smart (or you wouldn’t be sending these kinds of valentines): Let them do the math.
You can download the full set here, which includes all 30 designs from all five years (a 1.5 MB PDF document).
As usual, print them out on (or otherwise affix to) card stock, personalize, and [some steps omitted] enjoy the resulting lifelong romance.
Update: New cards have been released! Please check out the 2019 set, which contains all 42 cards from 2013 through 2019.
Linkdump: January 2017
- Cool drafting tools: the Keuffel & Esser Trammel Ellipsograph. (See also: 507 movements.)
- Just Add Water: The history of Sea Monkeys, dark side and all.
- Magica: A beautiful solenoid coil driven wooden clock
- An introductory servo control project with ROS, the Robot Operating System
- Dial-A-Grue: Text adventure games with a rotary dial phone
- Another take at weaving string art with a 3D printer
- VisiCut: a userfriendly tool for laser-cutting
- How Canned Mandarin Oranges are made: in Spain and China, and Japan
- The history of the MOS Commodore KIM-1 Computer in pictures
ATmegaXX8 Target Boards in Funk Amateur
We just got a copy of the December 2016 Funk Amateur, a German ham radio and electronics magazine.
There’s a two page spread on our ATmegaXX8 Target Boards with examples of how to use them for various circuit and projects.
Linkdump: December 2016
- A jumping sun dog.
- Design and 3D print parametric battery holders.
- Code Combat: An open source programming game for learning how to code.
- 3D print your own (oversized) Curta Calculator.
- Why spaghetti breaks into 3 pieces, via finite-element simulation (YouTube).
- Inside the LM108 op amp on Ken Shirriff’s blog.
- A baby dinosaur tail, preserved in amber.
- Mike’s Electric Stuff tears down a $500k Genome sequencer (YouTube).
- The Brother Type-O-Graph pen plotter.
- If you don’t talk to your kids about quantum computing, who will? (SMBC Comics).
- Single-stroke fonts on the HP1345A vector display and in the movie WarGames (1983).
- How it’s made: Ribbon candy (YouTube, via Neatorama).
- Threadtone: Computational string art
- A sweater for your drone.
Robert Dering: Batik Egg Artist
Daniel Clifton wrote up a nice article at 101highlandlakes.com about Robert Dering, a retiree who makes batik dyed eggs he gifts to people in his community. The article talks about the process of making them, including using an EggBot.
He started batik egg coloring about 15 years ago after Martha Stewart demonstrated it on her TV show. (Dering said it’s a bit embarrassing to admit he watched the show, but he pointed out he was retired and you never know from where you can learn something new.) The first few were terrible, but he continued, improving with each one.
“I’m still improving,” he said.
For most of those years, he used a small, hand-turned lathe designed for batik egg coloring to pen on a design. It was a bit tedious. But recently, he came across a mechanical device called the EggBot, which does that step for him using a computer program. The program frees up Dering’s creativity. He simply scans a photo or a design into the computer program, which adapts it for the EggBot, which, in turn, draws it on an egg.
There ends the time-saving. Now it’s back to the dying, waxing, and washing.
