Lightplot is a robotic 3D light painting system. Animation is exported from 3DS Max, and imported into the Lightplot software which then drives a robotic arm to draw the models in the air. The software also controls a DSLR camera to take long exposure photographs of each frame of animation.
The project grew from early experiments with Lego NXT and robotics. It currently comprises a custom built robotic arm controlled via Phidgets boards, which are driven by a stand alone Windows application written in C# and Microsoft .net. The exporting software is written in Maxscript within Autodesk 3DS Max.
Make sure to check out his website and watch the video of how the entire setup works. Here is a pic of the Lightplot rig:
Really great work! Here is another of my favorite demos:
The Tesla Gun is a hand-held, battery powered lightning machine. It is a spark gap Tesla coil powered by an 18V drill battery. You pull the trigger, and lightning comes out the front.
It is functionally inferior to that of Tesla’s design in the Five Fists in a few important respects. Notably, it is a bit longer and heavier than Tesla’s own. It also cannot (yet) create an ion wind strong enough to cushion the user when leaping from a four story building.
On the other hand, my design is an improvement in two important respects: 1) It is battery powered, and 2) It actually exists.
I had such a great time teaching my first Processing workshop this past weekend. I had a wonderful group of ten students to spend the day with and get them started on their own creative coding adventures.
We set aside the last half hour of the class as “free time” for everyone to make something on their own. (An idea I borrowed from Seb’s CreativeJS training.) It was amazing to see what the class came up with even in such a short time. Most of them had never even opened Processing or done any kind of programming before. That made it even more impressive!
I created this as a simple project for those just starting out in robotics. It is relatively inexpensive, requires minimal tools and is easy to build. Once finished you have an expandable robotic platform that fits in the palm of your hand and can be easily programmed in the Arduino environment.
So, this is a project that was nearly a month in the making. I set out to make a sound-reactive EL panel but found that driving EL in such a way is actually kind of difficult. If you’ve been following the blog, I’ve been working on this project in one way or another since my transformers article, and it’s actually the reason I wrote that article.
Again, a disclaimer. There are over 8,000 words in this post that document all of my design decisions on this project. It is not a how-to guide, but if you have some background in EE, I hope that you gain something from it.
EL materials (wire, tape, panels) are an odd bunch. No matter where you look, EL panels seem to be always be made very cheaply and with very little documentation. There doesn’t seem to be any “pro” version of the stuff.
So my goal with this project was to try to exert more sophisticated control over EL materials. So far, everyone can seem to make EL blink fairly easily, but if I know my electronics, fancy gadgets don’t have blinking lights, they have pulsing lights that fade in and out gradually. This is usually because blinking a light is much simpler than dimming one.
So I want to make a dimming EL panel driver. And what the hell, let’s make it react to sound too.
Add a little audio-reactivity to your EL projects! Video on YouTube and Vimeo.
EL Wire 6V Sound Activated Pocket Inverter. A small, portable inverter for EL wire with an audio input! This inverter has a little microphone and will light the connected EL according to the surrounding audio volume. Makes for an easy reactive project.
This inverter requires 6V input (it works great with our 4xAA battery holder) and it can drive 2-3 meters (7 to 10 feet) of our high-brightness EL wire OR 1 meter (3 feet) of EL tape OR a 10cmx10cm piece of EL panel continuously for about 21 hours (off of 4xAAs).
There is a switch for selecting steady/sound/off modes – steady is always on. Comes with a single 2.5mm pitch female JST connectors, standard for all the EL wire and tape we carry. Theres also two power wires, youll need to connect these to a 6VDC power source.
You can plug any of our EL wire/tape into this inverter directly. To connect a raw piece EL wire to this, youll want a male connector wire
The EL inverter requires a load to stabilize itself. Do not run the inverter without at least 2 ft of EL wire attached! Otherwise the inverter can spike and damage itself
Like all inverters weve used, the 2000 Hz oscillation is slightly audible. To reduce the squeaking, we suggest opening up the case padding it with thick foam tape/weatherstripping. Squirting some hot glue around the capacitors may also help. We managed to get it silent this way.
Check out our EL TRON bag tutorial for ideas, as well as the EL wire couch video!
Soldering to raw EL wire is a little tricky but luckily we wrote a detailed step-by-step tutorial! The tutorial also covers a lot of information about EL and how it works.
This is my Maker Faire Bay Area 2012 project, the Arduino GRANDE. It is a fully functional Arduino that is about six times larger than real life. Come hear all about it at the Maker Faire this coming weekend, May 19th and 20th. I’ll be doing talks and demos on Saturday. http://makerfaire.com/pub/e/8185
Digital cameras are everywhere, and are such a common everyday item, but most of us don’t really know how they are able to take and store a picture in such amazing detail. EngineerGuy to the rescue. Bill Hammock, better known as EngineerGuy on the MAKE blog, gives us a detailed rundown of how the CCD in our digital cameras work. The video is a great introduction to Bill’s new book, Eight Amazing Engineering Stories: Using the Elements to Create Extraordinary Technologies.
Eight Amazing Engineering Stories reveals the stories behind how engineers use specific elements to create the material world around us. In eight chapters, the EngineerGuy team exposes the magnificence of the innovation and engineering of digital camera imagers, tiny accelerometers, atomic clocks, enriched uranium, batteries, microwave ovens, lasers, and anodized metals. In addition, short primers cover the scientific principles underlying the engineering, including waves, nuclear structure, and electronic transitions. “In Depth” sections cover entropy, semiconductors, and the mathematics of capacitors. Eight Amazing Engineering Stories forms the basis of the fourth series of EngineerGuy videos found on-line.
Recently our website underwent a complete makeover, and one of the coolest updates, in my opinion, are the product review tabs! Did I mention that I make some of this stuff? That means that you, the customer, have a direct line to me, the operator. Your product reviews are a powerful source of information! If the ball on the ball head pin you purchased is not round, I want to know about it. I want to know if my bezel cups are off-center. And please let me know if my crimps are cracking.
Like most manufacturers, we set quality standards that we strive to adhere to. These standards vary from product to product, alloy to alloy, and machine by machine, but the following example shows how I quality-check my snap set settings.
The viewer you see above is called an optical comparator, and it’s totally cool! See how one prong leg in the round viewer is a tiny bit taller than the other? What you’re seeing is a .001 difference in height. Whew – this is what we’d consider an acceptable variation. Any more difference than that and this piece would be scrapped. What’s most important is that the two curvatures are parallel to one another.
We get our jewelry supplies from these folks, they’re solar powered and we’re happy to see a look behind the scenes on their blog!
The installation „Supercharge Momentum“ is composed of varying surfaces which are oriented in the three dimensional space. The basic logic of the structure consists of replicas of the defining spatial elements.
Through integrated controllable light the different spatial patterns get illuminated indirectly. The time interval of the transmitted light pulses cause a constant reinterpretation of the spatial moments by the observer. Sound patterns which are sent synchronously into the structure alter the logic of the different patterns of light rushing to open and close the temporary window of perception.
I’ve been coming across a lot of installations like this recently — works in which smaller pieces of a larger space are individually defined in some way (usually with light or sound). Each smaller space exists on it’s own, and they are then combined in some sequence to form a whole. Even when things are moving as fast as this is, you get a sense of spatial superposition — summing the individual nodes to characterize the entire system.
Tagstand, a startup which helps companies integrate NFC tags into products and events, threw a massive cocktail party in New York to show off their capabilities. While details of the tech are sparse, from the picture above, it appears that Tagstand used the Adafruit PN532 NFC/RFID controller breakout board powered by an Arduino.
[Tagstand] will see its technology used to enable some nifty actions for the 3,500 guests, like tapping to tweet, posting pictures to Facebook and registering “likes” for the cocktails they’re drinking. Sounds like (kind of geeky) fun!
The event in question is New York’s big cocktail party for the opening night Gala at The New York Public Library, which is offering up 30,000 different cocktails, created by over 150 different bartenders. (Now you can see why “liking” a particular cocktail might come in handy – that’s a lot to remember.) In fact, after a guest likes a cocktail, they’ll be able to receive the drink recipe via a personalized email courtesy of foodie guide Tasting Table.
I swung by the ITP show last night, you still have one more night to check it out if you’re in NYC! Above: Etch-a-Sketch 3.0 by Yelizaveta Lokshina
ITP Spring Show 2012 Monday, May 14, 2012 – Tuesday, May 15, 2011 5pm – 9pm on Monday, 4pm – 8pm on Tuesday (Free and open to the public. No RSVP required.) NYU Tisch School of the Arts 721 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York
Right from the beginning I wanted the B9Creator to be different. Anodized aluminum construction, stainless steel hardware, many thoughtful features that enhance normal operation… all these things set the B9Creator apart from the DIY 3D Printer herd. But when it comes to printing complex, detailed and fragile objects, this is where the B9Creator really shines bright!
DIY 3D Printers based upon the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) concept simply can not match the higher resolution capability of the B9Creator. We utilize a powerful Deformable Mirror Device (DMD) projector to shine a 1024 x 768 pixel image onto a layer of photo-initiated polymer resin. The result is a quick solid cure of the entire layer in one operation. The layer thickness is typically 100 microns but your model can be sliced even thinner if you need even higher resolution. Note that 100 microns is .1 mm or about 0.004″
Printable catalog (PDF)
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