This was a very cool experience for us. We were asked by Gary Mauler to appear on the Fox 45 morning news to promote Electronica Fest. We showed up at the National Electronic Museum at 5:30am to prepare for our 6:10am, 7:10am, and 8:10am live coverage. Unfortunately the segments were very short so we did not get to explain our own projects. However, our Cornstarch Monster project stole the show. See for yourself.
Me and my wife recently had our first child. I’ve been trying to come up with some projects I can do for the kid. Well, around this time of the year the fireflies go crazy around my house, so we came up with the idea to do led fireflies in a jar. It should be something cool for him to stare at and is easy to build.
Schematics, C source code and hex file are available here on our wiki. If you want to build one it should only take about an hour.
I’m planning on making a version 2 with some changes, stay tuned for that one.
Our first birthday! Seems just like yesterday, HaHa was just a twinkle in Dave’s eye. Check out this video of us enjoying some inkjet-printed confection.
This video is in response to the one posted here, where a Mr. Riley Porter moves a 35 pound dumbbell with his CNC. We decided to try to trump his CNC’s weight-moving ability by pushing our machine to lift and move first 45, then 55 and finally 65 pounds! We wanted to continue with the weight increases, but did not have a safe way to attach more weight to the Z-axis assembly. Our CNC build is turning out to be quite the beast. Now all it needs is a catchy name…
The CNC machine’s construction has advanced to the point where we can begin to cut items. Being a bunch of teenagers trapped in adult bodies, someone decided that we should cut a throwing star from sheet aluminum. One copy of CamBam and 6 minutes later and the star was ready to be cut! After a few adjustments and a bit snapped in half from being dragged through the metal too fast, the cutting was underway. The star took about 10 minutes to cut and was an excellent first attempt at metal production. The next step is to use the CNC to cut more precise parts for itself and help bring about the Robot Armageddon. Special thanks to our newest sponsor, CamBam, for supplying us with a free copy of their most excellent software. Note: The soundtrack to this video may change at any time as we are experimenting with YouTube’s AudioSwap feature.