NYC Resistor

I have an idea I want to try out involving sintering (melting) powdered plastic with a laser as an alternative to extruding plastic from a nozzle.  To do this, I need some sort of plastic, ideally ABS plastic that is powdered and will absorb the laser light.  I’m guessing it will be an IR laser, but I figure black plastic would be a good bet for this.

Any ideas?

okay, so i hit up the lab to see if my cheap dc motor controller board could also be used to drive a stepper motor. verdict: absolutely, but it doesn’t like large steppers, and it’s not nearly as smooth as a chopper based stepper drive.

DC Motor Driver Hack from Zach ‘Iowa’ Hoeken on Vimeo.

I saw this over at Hack-a-Day and while this is nothing new, its still worth blogging about. This is a great example of how hacking every day things to create new useful things is cool. Expecially if you make something that cost $300 for $20.

“Speakers and microphones are physically similar - usually mics are much smaller to allow decent high frequency response. In this case, [Nathan] wanted something to pick up kick drums or bass guitars, without the cost of a commercial version like the subkick. It’s build around a dual coil 6.5 inch subwoofer. The passive circuit design allows the coils in the speaker to be configured for differing impedance, phase and isolation.” Link

Tonight, Wednesday October 24th at 7pm, we’ll be meeting at the lemurplex to share projects. Direction Link

There will be chance for you to share your work, a short tutorial on servos, and time to set up partnerships for collaborations!

Shown above is George at a meetup with the Lemurplex’s own Chu Chu. What subtitle can you think of for this photo? Leave them in the comments!

I’m on the lookout for some Victorian era clothes to wear to the steampunk themed Chaos Communications Congress this winter. If you’ve got a source or costume shop to recommend, let me know. While searching for top hats, bow ties, and vests, I stumbled upon some interesting facts about steam in New York City.

Some 30 billion pounds of steam every year flow beneath the streets of Manhattan from the Battery to 96th Street. While it is unknown to most New Yorkers, Con Edison’s subterranean steam system is the biggest steam district in the world, larger than the next four largest U.S. steam systems combined and boasting an annual steam production more than double that of Paris, Europe’s largest system. - Link

And the steam system’s got an 800 pound robot!

The Welding and Inspection Steam Operations Robot (WISOR) was developed for Con Edison of New York as a semi-automated means of maintaining subterranean steam pipes. While tethered to the surface for power and fiber optic visuals, WISOR uses an inch-worming motion for mobility through straight pipes where it mills and welds flanges. It is equipped with five cameras for inspecting damage and repairs, a milling device, and a MIG class welder that can rotate a full 360 degrees. - Link

It’s a giant robotic mig-welding worm that crawls through the steamy underbelly of the city!

Watching this amazing video over at Wired is pretty much guaranteed to blow your mind. Dr. Atala is printing body parts using a setup not unlike RepRap.

He’s using a modified HP printer with an elevator plate added to allow the device to day down multiple layers of organic cells and cross-linkers. He’s had enormous successes and has produced working bladders as well as heart constructs that actually begin beating within hours of being printed.

I’m curious whether Dr. Atala utilizes the bubblejet’s ability to spray precise patterns, or if he’s simply laying down stripes of material with each pass. If the latter is the case, I don’t see any reason why, once perfected and refined, RepRap wouldn’t be able to produce similar results, and possibly on a much larger scale.

I thought I’d make the first Software post to the blog. And since I am always on the hunt for good console, non-GUI, based applications to make my life easier, I thought I should share one of my findings.

For those of you who use ever used Linux or Unix in an environment where you only had access to a terminal, and you wanted to see an overview of system resources, you have probably used top. Top is nice little task manger that displays whats running, and its memory, cpu, owner and so on. But its ugly and a bit hard to understand. It looks something like this:

I don’t like it at all, and searching for a something to replace it, I found HTOP. Their website doesn’t really glorify how great this tool is, and their screen shots are blah, so here is one of mine.

As you can see everything is pretty =). Shows you what all yours cores are doing, even in my beefy 8 core machine. The ownership of a process not only by the user, but by another process which called it. It also supports mouse clicks (one of the few terminal applications that do). And can be customized completely to your liking for each user on your system. In public spaces people are often wowed by it, because it looks so kick ass, especially in full screen.

It took some time to understand what the colors in the graphs were, so I’ll label them here. Red is system usage, blue is idle usage, and green is user usage.

This has been an application I have used almost daily for the past year. Its also a rare sight, as most console applications lack in the level of control that htop gives you. Enjoy it!

Andrew Fentem has a video on his site of a very cool interactive LED cube. He doesn’t post any information about how the cube is made, but here is his ‘artist statement’:

World’s first cubic touchscreen computer games platform
(2007)

Featuring a unique ultra-bright (even in daylight) full-colour cubic screen and a unique cubic multitouch touchscreen technology (patent pending) this games platform has been programmed to implement various multi-dimensional games, puzzles, and lighting effects. This object will shortly be for sale in a limited edition from Kinetica Museum, the UK’s electronic art museum.

Here’s an interesting vid about the fab@home peeps. - Link

Fab@home wiki - Link

3 of these were to be sold at Maker Faire and it looks like only one sold at $2500 - Link

The Evil Mad Scientists made a blinking LED pumpkin. pretty easy, and looks like fun.