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Here at Art Milwaukee’s big shindig at Flux Design. Man, I’ve done a lot of talking. Gave away the last of our complete tie pin kits. Met lots of great folk in Milwaukee’s art community. Mad props to Jason H to getting Milwaukee Makerspace more involved with this community. I really feel like there is a lot of potential for awesome interaction between makers and artists and events like this one can make that happen.
I’m looking forward to next month!
Previously I had blogged about a Star Trek logo that I cast as gift for my sister-in-law. I’ll update that project later in the post, however, I held a second casting back from the blog as it was intended as a gift for my wife.
For a couple of years my wife co-ran Milwaukee’s Food Not Bombs movement. She has always had fond memories of that time and has on more than one occasion brought up their logo: a hand clutching a carrot. So, I decided to make her a pendant with a relieved carving of that logo. To begin with I pulled the jpg logo into Inkscape loaded with the Better Better DXF Output plugin. I used the Inkscape drawing primitives to trace over the major outlines of the logo and then export the tracing to DXF. Once in DXF I imported the file into CamBam where I cleaned of the drawing a little more and defined machining operations for our CNC Router to perform. I turned the outlines into a series of adjacent polygons. (e.g. a wrist polygon, a thumb polygon, etc.) I then setup pocket operations of varying depths on each polygon. Finally, I exported the file to G-Code for consumption by the Mach 3 router control program.
If you look you can kind of see the polygons even if the depth setting of each pocket is not apparent.
Above you can see the pendant in the process of being routed out and also the finished wax mold after routing. Below you can see the pendant after casting! She loved it and wears it frequently. I was a really good feeling to actually put some effort into making a gift this year. It made the act of giving the gift that much more special.
I also completed the Star Trek logo. I turned that into a broach.
Above you can see that I have mounted the Star Trek logo to a plastic backing. I’ve also cut one of Adafruit’s EL Panels way down in size and hooked it up to another one of her small inverters. The small inverter normally cannot run her panels, but after being cut down so much, it wasn’t a problem. Below you can see the two pieces put together.
And finally the finished gift!
As I said, I really enjoyed giving gifts that I made this year. I am going to try to do more of that!
Tonight we successfully spin cast a few bronze models! This is the first time ever, at the Makerspace. I’m totally stoked to have a new and neat piece of equipment operating here. Spin Casting now joins one of the many skills you can learn here.
Below you can see JasonH taking the torch to the bronze sitting in the crucible.
Neither JasonH nor myself have any real idea of what we are doing, but we gave it a try and it turned out! Below you can see the Star Trek logo that came from the wax mold I posted about earlier as well as bits of the sprue. It still has a good bit of investment stuck to it, but I’m out of time for tonight.
Below is a video of the spin caster in action. You can see the red glow of the molten metal being driven into the investment cavity.
I got my BeagleBone in today! In brief it is a high speed (720Mhz) ARM development board that takes a lot of inspiration from Arduino. At 720Mhz, however, there is plenty of juice to run Angstrom Linux or even Android.
It comes with a Linux SD card so I fired it up an gave it a whirl. Out-of-the-box the board runs a web server that runs Node.js and serves a web-IDE called Cloud9. They’ve set up Node.js libraries to make the programming look a whole lot like the Arduino. Check it:
They say it’s not quite ready for prime time and won’t be until sometime in 2012. But the blinky light program worked just fine. Seems like they are off to a great start.
I am thinking about this device as a fixed function server that will serve up a configuration GUI for my access control system and poll the door readers. Right now the Access Control server runs on a normal Ubuntu server, but in a commercial application you’re going to get folks who just plain have a black thumb with computers. These folks can be a real drain on support. This BeagleBone device could possibly be made black-thumb proof.
So we recently got a spin caster in the space.
Jason H and I are working towards doing our first casts. To that end I’ve milled out a wax Star Trek logo that I hope to cast into a gift for my sister-in-law this holiday season. It will have an EL panel behind it and will be worn as a brouch.
