In LA

I’m feeling pretty happy about this one. It’s my first somewhat complicated CAD design, and it works well. It’s a mount which holds a blower fan next to the extruder on my 3D printer and aims a stream of air towards the plastic as it prints, to cool it quickly so that the next layer is printed on a solid base.

There’s something really satisfying about measuring the dimensions of an item using calipers, sketching out a part meant to fit, designing it in a computer, printing a copy, fitting it, making changes to the design, fitting it, and ending the process with a working part that fills a need.

The files for printing and additional images are available on thingiverse.

During the 2+ hours it took to print the full-scale Yoda Lite at .2mm layer height the other day, I decided to power up the DSLR and LED light, and document the process. The result is this short video which includes many handheld macro shots of my Printrbot+ in action.

The music is Kenichi Ōkuma’s track for the Flat Zone 2 level of the Wii game Super Smash Bros. Brawl; A gratingly blippy tune¹ that evokes 60s-era space age lounge. I wouldn’t normally use commercial music, but as far as I can tell this track is unavailable for purchase (at least in the USA), and it deserves some exposure outside of the 4-year-old video game for which it was composed.

1. I use the word “grating” with much love, I admire the way the otherwise unpleasant beeps form a catchy tune. [↩]

I like coffee¹ . I like open-source software and hardware. I like the idea of having an over-engineered geeky commercial-quality espresso machine that I and a community can hack. So I found this kickstarter campaign to be sufficiently intriguing to warrant a buy. I mention it here because it’s interesting and because it ends in just a few days.

PID-Controlled Espresso Machine

The reward for investing $300 in this kickstarter project is a v0.2 model² of this as yet non-extant³ espresso machine. It’s supposed to ship in December 2012, which for me will make it a nice surprise Hannukah present as I’ll likely have forgotten it’s enroute.

$300 sounds steep, but this machine includes a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller to regulate temperature and pressure throughout a shot of espresso’s “pull”, with the aim of producing a noticeably better result. Commercial home machines that include a PID controller tend to start around $700. Many people modify cheaper home espresso machines to add a PID controller, and kits for that modification appear to cost about $2-300⁴.

Kickstarter is fascinating to me. People post the project for which they’d like to raise money, list various reward levels, and other people on the net are invited to invest in it for a limited time. It’s a way for engineers with an idea to raise enough funds to rent space and start up manufacturing⁵. The reward for backing a projects that are manufactured is often a discounted price on an early version of the product. Several successful products have already been funded via this mechanism, the most famous so far being the LunaTik watch.

1. My wife really likes coffee, and gave her blessing to this purchase instantly when I tentatively ran the idea past her. [↩]
2. The v0.1′s sold out and will ship earlier. [↩]
3. except as a prototype [↩]
4. I did see that one person on the net has manage to do such a mod for less with some lesser-known Chinese-made components. [↩]
5. or increasingly a way for filmmakers to crowd-fund their filmmaking projects [↩]

I threw together this little¹ damask pattern, which I’m using as my desktop, iPhone, and iPad background. Figure I’d share in case anyone else would enjoy it.

Click the thumbnail at right to get hold of a png image at the exact resolution required for the iPhone 4G’s “retina” display. 960×540. Perhaps you can spot the game of Pong in it?

If you feel like using it on your phone, click through to the full-size image, then click and hold on the image to save it to your library, then navigate to and choose it in the wallpaper settings. Neato.

To make your own damask pattern, sit yourself down in front of a computer running Adobe Illustrator and check out this great tutorial over at tutsplus.com.

1. Don’t you just love it when people are proud of an achievement, and they express their pride couched in diminutive adjectives and verbs that indicate the achievement took a minimal amount of effort. e.g.: “Oh, those little baubles I tossed off the other day? The full-scale model of the pyramids at Giza? It was nothing.” In this case, I think I’ve come up with a pattern I like (partly due to subject matter) but the pattern will probably please very few, (partly due to subject matter). I’m using the diminutive out of respect for those who hate retrogaming or hate damask patterns or just hate life in general. [↩]

I’m loving this infographic/comic from xkcd:

Found via swisscheeseandbullets.com via themadeshop.tumblr.com. That’s a lot of attributions for one comic whose most direct link is provided above, but they’re worthwhile, as swisscheeseandbullets has a web design I quite like, and themadeshop’s logo becomes a red-cyan anaglyph on mouseover –how cool is that?

This blog has long been overdue for a redesign. I’ve grown tired of rounded corners, sans-serif body fonts, and small photos. It’s high time I made some changes around here.

So welcome to phase one of my blog redesign. Hopefully the text is now more readable, the photos and videos have more room to breathe, and everything looks and feels better, more or less.

Further changes are to come. With phase two, more consistency. Phase 3, refinement. Phase IV, killer ants.

I stumbled upon a great website of old letterhead images yesterday. You should check it out if you like such things. At the moment, it features historic artifacts such as Marie Curie’s letterhead, that of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and “Python (Monty) Pictures Ltd.”, among others. Well worth a look. Go.

I thought this was pretty amusing, maybe you will too.

Alien vs Pooh, a webcomic or book or site-specific installation or something, by C.H. Burger: