Courtesy Zach Hoeken's Flickr Stream. CC'ed

Every tech blog on the planet is covering CES. I’m not. I don’t get to spend a week in vegas hanging out and seeing the new technologies. I have to go to work. I cry, and sometimes I wonder what the whole point of it all is. But, at least some of our members aren’t confined to this special weekday hell that I am.

Makerbot Industries, co-founded by three of our members is manning a booth at CES!

I hear a lot of the technology this year is related to 3D. I guess a 3D printer is right up their alley. Personally, I’ve been pretty turned off to the whole 3D thing since Zaxxon. But, I try not to judge.

Also I heard there was some form of polar bear television on display there. Not sure why they’d want to encase a visual display device in the horrific visage of one of the worlds most infamous killing machines. I guess I’m just not up on what people want out of their electronics these days.

We learned how how to make your internetz better with awesome blinky LEDs all over your internetz, like this:

This is what ya’ll missed at the plug-in firefox workshop, btw.

First, take this code:
http://wiki.artzilla.org/nycresistor_background_blinking_lights_using_jquery
and copy it. Then make it funky. Or not, you can just copy the code.

Then, paste it in here:
http://arantius.com/misc/greasemonkey/script-compiler
in the user script part. Next hit ‘Compile!’ and it will generate you a .xpi file.

You can open that file and your firefox add-ons window will pop-up asking you to install it. for god sakes people, install it!
Restart your browser and when you open it again you will find led blinky goodness.

You’ll have these EVERYWHERE:

I learned it from Jamie and Tobi of http://fffff.at
The amazing animated gif was drawn by Bre,and the code was written LIVE during class by Jamie.
And I had these blinky LEDs in my browser the entire time while writing this blog post, which has made my life so much better.

I do all of my hacking at the NYC Resistor hacker space, and I’m proud to announce the most recent fruit of my labors: the Sanguino. This board is an Arduino-compatible board that boasts 4x the memory (64K!) 4x the RAM (4K!) and 12 more pins (32 IO pins!) Its all open source and you can get one from the RepRap Research Foundation for only $25. Sweet!

Oh, and I managed to get this footage last night. Check it out.

Sanguino: Arduino’s Big Brother from Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken on Vimeo.

We’re not always hacking at NYC Resistor: sometimes we play with exothermic reactions that turn liquids into solids! Here is a timelapse of me casting some RepRap Extruder MKII parts to play with.

Smooth-on Timelapse from Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken on Vimeo.

Play or Die

So here’s a quick preview of the LED Array Jacket. I’m pretty excited it’s managed to light. Currently I am redesigning the driver circuit and boarduino to work with non-solid core wiring and to be more elegant and clean. But I thought this might wet your appetites.

Heres the first of many timelapses of my RepRap machine printing. I’ll be working on the quality and lighting. If anyone wants to give me a hand, let me know!

RepRap Print Timelapse from Zach ‘Iowa’ Hoeken on Vimeo.

NYC Resistor Timelapse from Zach ‘Iowa’ Hoeken on Vimeo.

The first of many timelapse videos of cool stuff happening at the space. Someone get me better music. =)

I moved all my robots into the space this previous weekend, and it took much less time than I thought. This was great because it left me with 2 more days to code and work on my robot. You see, I’ve been participating in the RepRap open source project to create a self-copying 3D printer for quite a while. I finally found enough time to fix some bugs that were preventing me from printing.

If you’re interested, read more on the RepRap Builders blog entry.

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.