Shared posts

29 Oct 13:05

The MTU problem

by sharhalakis

by Jouke

02 Apr 12:44

MC Escher Inspires a Reptilian Floor

by Adam Fabio

reptile-floor

A simple room refinishing project lead [Kris] to his biggest hack yet, a floor inspired by MC Escher’s Reptiles printMaurits Cornelis Escher is well known for his reality defying artwork. His lifelong passion was tessellation, large planes covered identical interlocking shapes. Triangles, squares, hexagons all EscherExampleinterlock naturally. Escher discovered that if he cut out part of a shape and replaced it on the opposite side, the new shape will still interlock. In Reptiles, Escher created a lizard shape by modifying a hexagon. One side flipped over to become the nose, 4 others to become the feet, and so on. If the cuts are all made perfectly, the final shape would still interlock.

[Kris] was inspired by a photo of a commercial flooring project using small wooden reptiles as the tiles. He wanted to go with larger wooden tiles for his room. He knew his shapes had to be perfect, so he wrote a computer program to split the hexagon perfectly. Armed with art in DXF format, he went looking for a flooring company to help him. The silence was deafening. Even with artwork ready to go, none of the local custom flooring shops would take his job. Undaunted, [Kris] bought an older CNC machine. The machine was designed to be driven from MS-DOS via the parallel port of a Pentium II era PC. [Kris] substituted an Arduino running GRBL. After some GCode generation, he was cutting tiles.

The real fun started when it was time to glue the tiles down. With all the interlocking parts, it’s impossible to just glue one tile and have it in the perfect position for the next. In [Kris'] own words, “You have to do it all in one go”. Thanks to some family support and muscle, the flooring project was a success.  Great work, [Kris]!


Filed under: home hacks
04 Oct 11:26

Step into the Box

by Adam Fabio

thebox

Take three industrial robots, two 4’ x 8’ canvases, and several powerful video projectors. Depending on who is doing the robot programming you may end up with a lot of broken glass and splinters, or you may end up with The Box.  The latest video released by the creators project, The Box features industrial robots and projection mapping. We recently featured Disarm from the same channel.

The Box is one of those cases of taking multiple existing technologies and putting them together with breathtaking results. We can’t help but think of the possibilities of systems such as CastAR while watching the video. The robots move two large canvases while projectors display a series of 3D images on them. A third robot moves the camera.

In the behind the scenes video, the creators revealed that the robots are programmed using a Maya plugin. The plugin allowed them to synchronize the robot’s movements along with the animation. The entire video is a complex choreographed dance – even the position of the actor was pre-programmed into Maya.

The actor and robots describe several of the principles of magic: transformation, levitation, intersection, teleportation, and escape. All build up to the famous [Arthur C Clark] Quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

While we loved the video, we can’t help but think of some changes. What if we didn’t have such repeatable robots – or robots at all? [Johnny Chung Lee] was showing off his foldable displays tracked live by Wiimote back in early 2007. Using [Johnny’s] system, even humans would be accurate enough to handle the canvases.

[Thanks Doug and Mark!]


Filed under: robots hacks, video hacks
05 Jul 16:18

07/03/13 PHD comic: 'PFF'

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham
www.phdcomics.com
Click on the title below to read the comic
title: "PFF" - originally published 7/3/2013

For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

31 May 12:57

Human Asteroids makes you a vector triangle ship

by Brian Benchoff

asteroids

In 1979, [Nolan Bushnell] released Asteroids to the world. Now, he’s playing the game again, only this time with the help of a laser projector and a Kinect that turns anyone sitting on a stool – in this case [Nolan] himself – into everyone’s favorite vector spaceship. It’s a project for Steam Carnival, a project by [Brent Bushnell] and [Eric Gradman] that hopes to bring a modern electronic carnival to your town.

The reimagined Asteroids game was created with a laser projector to display the asteroids and ship on a floor. A Kinect tracks the user sitting and rolling on a stool while a smart phone is the triangular spaceship’s ‘fire’ button. The game is played in a 150 square foot arena, and is able to put anyone behind the cockpit of an asteroid mining triangle.

[Brent] and [Eric] hope to bring their steam carnival to LA and San Francisco next spring, but if they exceed their funding goals, they might be convinced to bring their show east of the Mississippi. We’d love to try it out by hiding behind the score like the original Asteroids and wasting several hours.


Filed under: Kinect hacks, laser hacks
30 May 12:04

05/29/13 PHD comic: '(More) Great Tweets of Science'

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham
www.phdcomics.com
Click on the title below to read the comic
title: "(More) Great Tweets of Science" - originally published 5/29/2013

For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

25 Apr 14:48

04/24/13 PHD comic: 'The Shared Office Printer'

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham
www.phdcomics.com
Click on the title below to read the comic
title: "The Shared Office Printer" - originally published 4/24/2013

For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

24 Mar 12:52

Voyager 1

So far Voyager 1 has 'left the Solar System' by passing through the termination shock three times, the heliopause twice, and once each through the heliosheath, heliosphere, heliodrome, auroral discontinuity, Heaviside layer, trans-Neptunian panic zone, magnetogap, US Census Bureau Solar System statistical boundary, Kuiper gauntlet, Oort void, and crystal sphere holding the fixed stars.
22 Mar 14:29

03/20/13 PHD comic: 'How irreplaceable are you?'

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com
Click on the title below to read the comic
title: "How irreplaceable are you?" - originally published 3/20/2013

For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!