Stokes’ ProjBlog

A real pain in the neck September 5, 2012

I’ve been working on my laptop on the couch quite a lot, and it’s started to cause me real problems. I’ve been getting intense ‘thunderclap’ headaches, and they appear to be a posture-related injury: slouching on the couch, looking at something in my lap has done something awful to my neck. To improve things, I’ve started spending my day working at Artisan’s Asylum, where I set up on one of the electronics shop benches. That’s better, but looking down at the screen is still aggravating my neck, so I put together a quick-and-dirty laptop stand out of yet more scrap wood and junk bin hardware.

The sides are part of an IKEA spice rack, and the other metal parts are server rack-mounting hardware. Thumbscrews on either side permit adjustment of both the height and the angle.

My neck is already feeling better.

I gotta gotta gotta gotta Kinect June 13, 2012

My Xbox 360 unceremoniously died one night, leaving the fate of New Vegas and the whole of the Mojave Wasteland hanging. My initial attempt at reflowing the solder, despite using the proper equipment, was an abject failure. Admittedly, I didn’t try as hard as I could have; I’d been coveting a Kinect for a while, and I finally had an excuse to get one cheap as part of an Xbox bundle. Say what you will about Microsoft, but the Kinect is a cool piece of hardware.

I didn’t originally intend to use it as a video game controller, but since it would take some time before I got it set up for hacking, I wanted to try it out. That required finding a place to put it that was high enough and — to work in my narrow living room — also as far back as possible. If this were the olden days, I’d have put it on top of the TV; here, in the future where TVs are thinner than they are tall, that isn’t an option. I’d have to get more creative.

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Coffee to go May 9, 2012

My coffee table has a history, or at least its top does. When he was half my age, my father worked in a department store; there, he picked up a nice piece of plywood from an old window display. It, as a coffee table, followed him through grad school and eventually to his first professorship in the Pioneer Valley where I was born. My mother used it (with a different base) as a slide for me as a baby. I remember first eating Chinese food for the first time off of it. When I was in junior high and high school, the surface (with another base) bore witness to many Dungeons explored, Dragons slain, and liters of Mountain Dew consumed. The table (with yet another base) was the first piece of furniture in my first place after college. hen I moved to the Boston area to continue my career in the game industry, it came with me.

But now, its base is disintegrating again. (more…)

Kickin’ it February 18, 2012

The new Artisan’s Asylum space is big. Very big. 31,000 square feet big.

The space maintains a fleet of Razor^tm kick-scooters. In a space the size of Artisan’s Asylum, they are actually quite useful; the space is the width of two city blocks, and it can take several minutes to walk from one end to the other. A scooter can make it in half the time. The only problem with the scooters is that you really can’t carry much of anything on one. I decided to remedy that.

One of the scooters has a ‘basket’ on the front, made from a square nail bucket. It’s very handy, good for moving small tools from shop to shop, but you can’t carry anything much larger or heavier than that. I decided to build a trailer hitch and trailer for handling bulkier cargo.

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Look upon my workbench, ye mighty, and despair! November 4, 2011

With the wrap-up of the big Artisan’s Asylum buildout, I was finally able to outfit my own 100 square foot workspace and unpack the 64 cubic feet of stuff in my assigned gaylord*, everything shipped over from the old Willoughby & Baltic space on Joy Street.

The huge new Artisan’s Asylum space is part of the former Ames Safety Envelope factory on Tyler Street. The slim majority of the place has been divided into 50 and 100 square foot rental plots, separated by chest-high partitions. Even with wood, welding, machining, and electronics shops — each nearly as large as the entire space on Joy Street — there are more than 100 of these private spaces. My space is #7, directly behind the front desk. It’s also next to the electronics shop (E+R, for electronics and robotics) where I do most of my work.

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“How I Spent My Summer Vacation” November 29, 2010

I have some excuses for not updating my project blog in a long, long while. For one, I spent a month doing this:

Incidentally, do kids still write ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’ essays when they get back to school, or have they gone the way of Penmanship classes and Chisanbop?

A display of character(s) December 8, 2009

As the W&B soda machine has been unplugged for the winter, I am putting the soda machine hack project on hold for a couple of months. In the meantime, I’m returning to some past projects, several of which I never wrote up in the blog. One such project is a system for handling and displaying an ultra-tiny bitmap font on a little graphic LCD, the sort that were on nearly every 90s cell phone and are currently popular with hobbyists.

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Materialization: successful! October 7, 2009

After some modifications to the design and some tweaking to the print settings, pan/tilt rig version 2.0 is a success. At a marginally lower extrusion rate and temperature, the accuracy was greatly improved — this version was much less “lumpy.” This improvement turned out to be somewhat of a mixed blessing, however. The first draft ended up being slightly too small to fit the servos, so this version was scaled up by 10% prior to printing. Combined with the improved precision engendered by the print setting tweaks, the final result ended up being a bit too loose to grip the servos with friction alone. A small rubber band around each holder keeps the motor nicely in place, however.

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Blatant Fabrication October 2, 2009

I made my first tentative steps into the world of desktop manufacturing last night. Having a couple of small servo motors, I thought it would be cool to make a tiny pan/tilt rig with them. I also thought this would be a good first 3D printing project. A couple months ago, several of us at W&B got together and built a Makerbot*, a small hobbyist’s 3D printer based on the RepRap project. Like RepRap, the Makerbot fabricates objects out of extruded ABS plastic, the same stuff of which LEGO blocks are made.

The Makerbot fabricates things by laying down a thin bead of molten plastic onto a small platform. The platform moves in two dimensions beneath the extruder, creating a cross-section of the model being built. After one cross-section is complete, the extruder rises and the next cross-section begins. It is a little like creating something from cake icing — I wonder if that’s the origin of the Cupcake name.

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Random idea: unique IDs on the Arduino September 23, 2009

I was thinking about ways to create multiplayer games/toys using the Arduino platform and realized a key difficulty: telling different Arduinos apart when there are more than two. Optimally, the system should not depend on one Arduino being the ‘boss’ and should be as simple as possible for the programmer. I think I have a solution.

This is the idea: modify the pre-compiler (or, more specifically, the IDE code that calls the precompiler) to automatically include a #define statement, defining MY_UNIQUE_ID as the last sixteen bits of the build time in milliseconds. The chances of two Arduino builds being done in the same thousandth of a second are extraordinarily low, effectively making the ID unique for all practical reasons. In the code, all the programmer needs to do is use MY_UNIQUE_ID as a variable.

I’ll have to take a look at the Arduino IDE source.

Update (9/24): A couple of people have commented on this on Facebook (where this appears via RSS), suggesting some dynamic, real-time solutions. These are good ideas, but the situation I was imagining isn’t one in which all the points would have access to each other simultaneously; instead, temporary connections are being made between units, probably by physical contact.