steve cooley presents

alrighty, then.. so I’m starting to get my bearings with how all the software works to run jobs through the blacktoe CNC router. I switched from cambam over to sheetcam and now I’m getting really good results. There’s still a certain amount of strangeness, probably all my fault, so I’m still learning what works and what doesn’t. Here’s a video I did to show how the blacktoe does with machinable wax:

The end result is a mold to use for casting translucent silicone into for use in my beatseqr project, as a replacement for the hand-cut-and-sanded acrylic buttons that I’m currently using. You never know how an experiment will really go until it’s over, and now that this experiment is over, I’ve learned a lot and will make a bunch of adjustments:

1. change the silicone product from tap plastics platinum cure translucent (way too wobbly for this application) to smooth-on sorta clear 40. I saw this product at the Maker Faire this past weekend and really liked the firm quality of the cured product. I think it will be a really good candidate. Smooth-on dragon skin 30 was my second-best candidate.
2. cut a new button mold using the techniques I’ve learned by doing this one.
3. adjust the height of the button to be not as tall as this test.
4. adjust the flashing surrounding the buttons to be not nearly as tall. I had it set to be 0.1″ tall, and that’s probably 0.08″ too much. all I need is for it to basically be thick enough to keep all of the buttons together, and that’s it.
5. think about how to diffuse the LED light going into the button… this new silicone is water-clear… so … I’ll need a way to adjust that quality so it looks good. maybe just a sheet of paper under the silicone flashing… we’ll see how that goes.

So… progress continues. I’ll post the result of the next prototype when it’s done.

Welp, I decided on which CNC rig to go with. I wanted to keep my options open for the future, so I decided to go with a bigger rig than I had originally planned on committing to. I decided that I could commit several continuous days in a row to assembly, setting up a major section of my garage, and purchasing a couple-few extra things to accommodate the buildyourcnc.com Blacktoe 2×4.

Here’s the timelapse of the build:

Here’s the first run:

And here’s the first real job I ran with it:

Woohoo! Very happy!

After inquiring around about prices for lasers, I’m coming to the realization that maybe what I need isn’t a laser but a CNC rig.  I’m lucky to live near enough to Techshop that making the occasional drive up there is doable, but not a sustainable ongoing possibility with my family time needs.  So take a look at the research I’ve done into who the top contenders for desktop CNC could be for an almost total n00b to the sport.

Alright, so I know the G-code exists and that most every interesting machine that I want to work with understands how to work with that, so now it’s up to me to complete the equation. This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive, and by no means am I an expert on the topic, but based on what I could digest from their websites, this is what I took away from it all.   When I priced things to be as ready to run as possible starting with no previous equipment, here’s the ballpark figures:

These prices assume you already have a computer… duh. And they don’t really take the cost of software into consideration, which is probably ok because there are a lot of software packages out there so I’ve heard. They do different things and cost different amounts of money… so it’s hard to factor it in easily. The other thing I haven’t factored in here is speed. And because I’m inexperienced, I don’t really know how to gauge that, other than to see that the Blacktoe is fast as hell. Ok, so I get that these machines all have an “inch per minute” speed rating… I would suspect it would also depend on 1. your router, 2. your gcode, and 3. the material you’re milling… so given those parameters, what does “high speed traverse” mean? Just how fast the machine does what it needs to do when it’s not doing a cutting maneuver? That’s my best guess.

So, those are the current contenders. Did I miss anything substantial? Leave a comment and let’s get it on the chart.

Hey there, it’s Steve Cooley from Haptic Synapses and Beatseqr.com.

Here’s a trick that I’ve been playing around with using quartz composer to generate curve data and send it out to osculator, and then from there you can send it out as midi cc to whatever music app you want that will accept that data to control various things. It’s pretty neat, and there’s a lot of room for exploration here. As required by the Rules of Ideas Being Spread On the Internet, we have to have a silly name for this, so let’s call this a “quartzillator”.

Load up quartz composer. I think even 10.4 had the OSC sender patch, so it should work that far back. 10.5, 10.6, and presumably every version after should be able to do this.

In a blank composition, place an “interpolation” patch and an “OSC Sender” patch. The options of these patches are ok at the default, just find out what port quartz composer is going to be using to send the OSC data out on so you can tell Osculator to listen on that port.  Add a new float OSC argument with whatever name you want.. I called mine “/oscillator”.

listen to the port sent from QC in osculator and set it up as MIDI CC

Connect the interpolation patch’s Result output port to the OSC argument’s input port. Quartz Composer is now sending curve data out on that udp port with that argument.

Connecting the interpolation patch to the OSC send patch

Launch Osculator and set the OSC Input Port to whatever the output port number was in the OSC Sender patch in quartz composer.   The argument that you made (in my case “/oscillator”) in QC should show up automagically.  Set the event type to be a “MIDI CC” output and set the value to be zero (for now.. there may be some conflicts on some numbers you choose.. most seem to be ok).

listen to the port sent from QC in osculator and set it up as MIDI CC

Ok, so if everything is working correctly, you should be able to go to your music app of choice that will accept MIDI CC messages, and assign the new “quartzillator” to whatever parameter you like.  Here’s a video of the effect in Propellerhead Reason… again, this should work in logic, live, reason, VSTs with midi learn, AU’s… pretty much anywhere that will accept midi cc.

ENJOY! Happy exploring!

I do love Omnigraffle. I do not love the … apparent default (?)… behavior of having your whole diagram fly into a new arrangement when you connect things together. This is called automatic layout. Here’s how to Make It Stop Doing That. Command-3, uncheck the “automatic layout” box.

Ahh, much better. Much Better. PHEW.

I write code for a living. Primarily PHP, but increasingly HTML, CSS, XML, JSON, Objective-C/Cocoa, Processing, and Arduino code. Over the last 8 years, I’ve been going back and forth using several editors. It seems kind of silly to think that I could have used 5 or 6 different programs to edit text, but there are good reasons why. So here’s an incomplete list of things that caused me to use, stop using, and maybe restart using these GUI programs:

• BBEdit
this is by far the program I’ve used the most. It’s the only program I trust to open a 100 Megabyte text file. I’ve been lucky to have my company pick up the latest version of BBEdit pretty much immediately after it’s released, so I’m particularly excited by the version 9 features. Code completion is nice. It seems to be pretty good about knowing about PHP. It doesn’t automatically close tags for you, but it does seem helpful. Another great feature new in this version is being able to drop a folder onto the BBEdit icon, and it will give you a file browser in a sidebar, and let you edit documents, tab free, directly from the file browser. Like every other modern text editor, it has clippings, or snippets, which is helpful. It’s search really is the best I’ve ever used. It’s just really nice. It saves search and replace actions for easy callback. It uses Grep. It’s nice. I would be nice if you could choose other syntaxes, grep certainly seems powerful enough. Mostly it would be nice to get some interactive experience using other regex modes. Not a deal breaker, I get my work done when I use BBEdit. There are so many great features in BBEdit, it’s hard to condense it down to one paragraph. As of version 9 and these new features, this application is back in my application dock. 

• TextMate
Textmate popped up a few years ago and was a stark contrast to BBEdit at the time. It’s major features that are different from BBEdit would be tab-commands, where you predefine snippets or commands and assign them to a key combination. Then when you’re editing text, you can type things like snippet-[tab] and whatever you defined as “snippet” will be replaced. It’s very powerful and can be very, very helpful. It has support for lots and lots of languages, and I’m sure there are a ton of features that I don’t know about. For PHP, i haven’t found it to be spectacularly helpful. As I’ve gotten into using SVN, I’ve noticed that TextMate creates a hidden .filename for *every* file it comes into contact with. So along with not being extraordinarily helpful with code completion with PHP and creating lots of not-invisible files, I’ve taken this off my application dock for now.

• Coda
Coda is kind of a lighter-weight text editing tool whose main focus is to reduce the number of tools required to do web development. It’s major feature is having text editing, CSS editing, web browser for code preview, terminal functionality, FTP connectivity through Transmit, and a slightly weird technical reference… all mashed into one application. It has some nice features… Really nice, in fact, for a budding programmer looking to learn or troubleshoot html/php/css code. I used this app to cement my understanding of how CSS works because of how easily you can roundtrip from editing to preview, in fact, on the same screen in the same window with screen splitting. Pretty nice. My particular job doesn’t require me to do this much, so while I admire the product immensely, I do not have this in my day-to-day set of tools. I am using it as a teaching tool, though, because I feel like it’s aimed directly at being fast and useful for learning CSS. 

• Komodo Edit
This app is a recent entrant to my toolbox, and I have to say that I’m *really* impressed. Komodo Edit is the “free” version of Komodo’s larger suite of development products, but I’m finding it to be very full-featured. What I love about this program is how extremely PHP aware it is, and how it helps me keep my tags closed. I find writing code in this program to be very easy, easy to read, easy to understand what’s going on where, and generally kind of awesome. There are a few things that aren’t quite as awesome as I would like, such as: It would really prefer you start a new project for everything. You can open individual files without doing this, but if you want to drop into a folder to edit more than one file, you gotta start a project. It’s not so annoying that it’s preventing me from seeing the awesome PHP code editing power it has, but I would love this app more if I could skip the project files and just edit files from a folder browser like every other text editor in this list. Also, I find the search and replace to be kind of annoying because it requires you to check a “replace” checkbox every time you bring up the search field. Even if you were just there and want to tweak your search or replace criteria. When I’m starting whole new projects, I’m trying to use Komodo Edit, but lately when I’m editing preexisting projects, I’ll drop them on BBEdit.

• Processing/Arduino IDEs
I’m only putting these in this list because they have two features that i wish I had in other text editors: keyboard-shortcut code cleanup and reformatting, and a “prepare for discourse” function where it creates a snippet of HTML that’s ready to post to a blog or discussion board. Super nice. Otherwise, these IDEs are kind of painfully minimal. But I put up with them because of what they produce. Which is awesome.

• XCode
Xcode is hands-down the best text editor I’ve ever used for objective-c and cocoa. It has *The Best* code completion niceties I’ve ever seen, and should be the absolute envy of every other text editor on this list. Hear that, everyone? Emulate the code completion functionality that XCode has. Sadly, XCode seems to want to actively not be useful for PHP. I’ve long held the idea that XCode would be a *killer* IDE for PHP if it only knew about its syntax. It’s unbeatable for Obj-C and Cocoa, and possibly for other languages, but I only use it for Mac OS X and iPhone development. Since all of these things are text based, I end up wishing I had some of the features from XCode in *any* of the tools I use for PHP… but oh well. 


Technorati Tags: arduino, bbedit, coda, komodo edit, processing.org, textmate, xcode

Hey, check out my fine art blog to see my new arduino project box. Here’s a little preview video:

arduino project box construction timelapse from stevecooley on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: arduino, stevecooley

There are a few websites out there that do screenshots of URLs based on how specific versions of browsers render pages… Here are two that I’ve found that are free.

This one does a huge list of browsers, with a somewhat significant waiting period for your results.

http://browsershots.org

This one does just IE (5.5, 6, 7, 8b), but it does it fast.

http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php

Technorati Tags: browser, render

when in xcode, you can start typing just about anything and hit escape or f5 to get it to give you a list of suggested things to automatically complete what you started typing.

Once you select one of the items in the list, hit control-/ to go forward, control-shift-/ to go backwards through the list of arguments… handy!

Technorati Tags: apple, bignerdranch, xcode

Techshop, The SF Bay Area’s open-access public workshop:

Jim sent word about the Techshop grand opening! – Hey, Makers! If you like to build stuff but you don’t have the tools, equipment, space, or know-how, TechShop is for you!

TechShop’s Grand Opening is Saturday, September 30 and Sunday, October 1, 2006 from 11:00 AM through 3:00 PM both days. There is no charge to attend the event.

Show And Tell at the Grand Opening (Saturday and Sunday) – If you have a project you would like to show to other Makers, bring it along and either show it to people yourself, or make a sign that explains what it is. We will supply tables on which projects can be displayed. Any project is fine as long as you think it would appeal to people who like to make things….

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Wow. Wowow. $1200 for 24×7 access to an insanely huge list of industrial tools for a year… $100 a month, or $30 for one-day access. For a year, that’s about the cost of one three unit university class, isn’t it? I think the trick here is to know what you’re going to need to do, plan everything out ahead of time, swoop in and do what you need and get out. This place is just far enough away that it’s kind of a trek if I were going to go two days in a row or longer… I dunno, maybe when I get my financial independence up to speed, I can swoop in during off-peak hours and it will make sense.

Technorati Tags: techshop

Behold the Canon A620 – rechargeable double A battery powered 7.1 Megapixel, 640×480@30fps hotness.

Behold again, Kiahuna Plantation, Kaua’i, 15 second exposure, 10:38pm, pitch black of the night. Larger photo here. Full rez (2304×3072) is there too, I’ll leave it to you to figure out where… it’s a big file. It’s pretty awesome, though.

Technorati Tags: canon

The San Jose airport could take a clue from portland: free wifi in the airport. It’s funny how greedy the technology center of the planet is when it comes to it’s own product. Lots of other airports are starting to understand…. free wifi isn’t a luxury, it’s part of attracting and keeping business to your airport and putting a shiny spot on an otherwise uncomfortable, sometimes miserable experience. Portland’s making a solid effort to make the airport someplace you wouldn’t mind flying through: free wifi, kid’s play area, comfortable chairs… plus, no armrests on the seats in the gates means you can stretch out when you get a 3 hour layover at 6am. Now if only they had a pile of clean blankets and pillows…

here’s the ol’ pro tripod iSight mount in action… acting as a digital camera while my regular one is in the shop…  I’m using BTV Pro to manually control the camera’s mechanical focus…  that works pretty good. Yes, those patches again.

Technorati Tags: diy, isight, make, omg, omgwtf, patchisi, wtf

I guess it depends on who you ask. To a designer or marketer, I’m a programmer. If you ask an application developer, I’m a “scripter”. If you ask some web technologist, I’m a programmer, and graphics people get lumped in with scripters. What? Wait, what scripts are people doing that aren’t programming anymore?

Technorati Tags: programming, scripting

So much to like in the new iLife 06, garageband getting a ginormous update, holy crap… including the ability to easily record audio (and video stills!) from iChat:

Apple.com

With GarageBand 3 and iChat, you can host your very own talk show as easily as carrying on a friendly chat with a few pals.

So even if today’s guests are in Paris while you’re in Peoria, you can still put on a podcast together.

Just start an audio chat using iChat and hit record. GarageBand simultaneously records the audio from your chat and assigns different tracks to each participant — identified by buddy name and icon — so you can edit everything seamlessly. And if you’re using iSight cameras to conduct a video chat*, GarageBand even captures a real-time still image every time each guest speaks.

See? Instant podcast talk show. And you didn’t even have to dodge a flying chair.

Technorati Tags: apple, garageband, ichat, podcast