This script has a *lot* of variables you can tweak.  I don’t even feel like I’ve put everything into this script that I want to, either.

an incomplete list of parameters you can adjust:

• knob radius
• knob height
• shaft hole radius
• shaft hole height
• set screw inclusion, radius, and location
• flatness of shaft hole
• rounding on top (thanks very much to http://iheartrobotics.com for the articles on edge rounding!)
• indentations
• directional indicators
• plus a lot more!

About

One of the most stressful things about making multiple copies of an electronics project is reliably locating interface controls that you like. Maybe you can locate them one time, but can you locate them a year from now? two years from now? And how much do they cost?

For example, I found some slide potentiometer knobs at Mouser.com for about $0.50 apiece two years ago, and they ran out of them… forever. I tried sourcing them elsewhere, and the best I could find was a seller that had them for $4.00 apiece (!!wtf!!). So that really sucks.

One strategy is to buy in bulk. But, buy too few and you may run out and pay twice for shipping.  Buy too many and you  end up with unused knobs sitting around not making your money back. That also sucks.

Round potentiometer knobs are somewhat readily available. But still, they can be from $0.80 to $5.00 each, and if you can’t find enough for your project, that can be problematic. Mostly I’m tired of paying multiple dollars for things that should basically cost $0.25 apiece. Aesthetics are important too, so having options beyond what’s out there is nice.

A different strategy is to print them yourself as you need them.  No shipping, no running out, and you get to call the shots on how it looks and how it fits. Now, I like this way. Plus, for my project, making the knobs just goes along with the rest of the stuff I’ve done myself.

Well... some are better than others. Limited success is better than no success at all.

Download

Click here to download the parametric potentiometer knob generator OpenSCAD script.

License

parametric potentiometer knob generator by steve cooley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at sc-fa.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://sc-fa.com/blog/contact.

edit 2012-02-01 : my voltages were set to the makerbot motors, where the should have been set to the moons motor voltages. :-\

For my kids, I think 3d printing is going to be one of the important tools of their lives. It uses the stepping stone that I was given and takes it further. Now not only can you visualize anything your mind can think of, but you can hold a copy of it in your hand. No doubt that 3d printing at home is in its infancy, much the same way that computers at home were when I was a kid. So, to me, 3d printing appears to be the most likely tool my kids can have to propel them into their future. In my opinion, a 3d printer in the home will foster: problem solving skills, imagination, healthy non-conformity, the concept of iteration, no fear of being wrong or failing, and hands on application of the scientific method.

So, I’m in research mode. Here are the links I can find to commercially available sub-$5000 hobbyist 3d printers. I’m mostly focusing on fused deposition modeling type printers. The other technologies I’ve seen for 3d printing are either experimental, lacking in resolution, lacking in base affordability, or the media is too specialized (and presumably expensive).

MakerBot Industries has one called the thingomatic. These guys have been at the heart of the maker/DIY front and honestly, they have a lot of momentum. Their machines are iterating very quickly, and they have a huge community rallying around their project. Their laser-cut plywood product is undoubtedly borne from the DIY mentality their product aims to foster. They have some super nice features like an automated build platform, and a new dual extruder head option. They’ve generated a lot of buzz about attracting $10M in investor funding, so it’s likely they will be able to afford support staff for the foreseeable future. Has Mac software available and/or printing from an SD card. Their wiki and build instructions are incredibly detailed. $1,299 kit, $2,500 assembled.

Reprap, represents the wild west of 3d printers. It sort of kicked off the DIY 3d printer revolution happening now. As such, it’s really focused on bootstrapping quickly with the least amount of time spent on worrying about what the machine looks like. (what the machine looks like?? Look what it’s DOING!) There’s no official source for parts. That’s kind of the point, though. It’s open source, so you need to find someone who will print our the parts for you (and you presumably pay them)

botmill surprise! a presumably reputable source for reprap based 3d printer design. No exterior enclosure, all wires exposed. This machine will undoubtedly appeal to the mad scientist crowd. $1,395.00 assembled. Pretty cheap, actually.

Ultimaker The videos I’ve seen of this thing are of it printing really really fast. Designed and sold out of the Netherlands. €1,194.00 base (kit)

UP! best consumer based enclosure design. The machine itself looks great. Sensible and clean. Definitely made to alleviate concerns about reliability and reputability. Looks like a real product. Compact. Comes with integrated software. Higher on the price scale. Has Mac software. You’d think they could price it under $2650+~$150 shipping. C’mon, China. What the hell. Alibaba says I can buy whole laser engravers for that price.

RapMan. Pretty. laser cut clear acrylic. Alibre sells software, so they probably will support the machines they sell for a while. With the revolution happening at the pace it is, your mileage may vary on how long they do support it. (5 years?)

Bits from Bytes 3DTouch lots of options for number of print heads. mo’ printheads, mo’ problems. It may be the most capable from an aspect of possibilities, but the workflow must be significant to munge multicolor GCode. Maybe not.. It’s probably right on the edge of being past the scope of being a machine for the home.

buildyourcnc’s white ant I have the buildyourcnc.com blacktoe 2×4 cnc machine and it’s great. Their white ant 3d printer is still in active development, and given the flexible nature of their design ethos, this could be cool. The downside here is that you can’t buy everything you need right from them. You have to pick up some of the required parts from MakerBot. Which is kind of a drag. What I think we owners of blacktoe and blue chick machines are waiting for is some word about why an extruder print head for our existing machines is impossible. I guess I could image why. I’d gladly replace my 3 axis control board with a 4 or 5 axis board if I could interchangeably use a router or a 3d printhead. GLADLY. Use the motion control table and hardware I already have for multiple tool heads? Yes, remind me why I can’t have this? A ridiculously large 2′ x 4′ FDM 3d printer. It’s probably impossible because its a ridiculous idea.

So, for me, time to make a verdict… and that task is pretty easy. MakerBot has the juice right now. I love how they’re dedicated to the movement and driving innovation. They have lots of instructions and a huge community. And funding, so more brains getting paid to focus on it means good things for the future.

If price is a sensitivity for you, buildyourcnc’s white ant would be a good choice, with botmill coming in a close second. If I was in the Netherlands, I’d probably go for the Ultimaker. UP! sure looks nice, but I can’t fathom why it’s so expensive. Cut the price in half and then it’s a horse race.

I just got my Alesis IODock for iPad. It solves some serious live performance problems for me!! Here they are:

1. Playing my iPad live is awesome, but keeping it powered up is a decision between power and midi data. Previously, I would plug in the camera connection kit for midi or a power plug. No more. The IODock has power to keep my iPad charging while in use, and a square style USB port.

2. Speaking of midi… Previously I’d have to connect a midi out usb device from my computer to a midisport UNO connected by the camera connection kit to the ipad. Giant hassles! Now with the IODock, I just go directly from the computer to the dock. No midi devices whatsoever between the computer and the iPad. Sweet!!

3. Flexible outputs… Since there are quarter inch output jacks and a headphone jack, I can use whichever I need to. Sometimes playing live, I can experience the iPad being too quiet… The headphone jack on the IODock gets *crazy* loud. So I have options for different mixing environments.

4. Looks professional. Always helps. Ima cover up this giant Alesis logo post haste, guys. (Sorry Alesis.) But the case looks good, the tilt is nice. A definite plus.

And I guess there are a bunch of other things that are in this box, but the items above cover the price of admission for me! Well done Alesis. This seems like it’s going to be a great product.

-steve

sCCweet (cheesily said: “shweet”) for the Korg iMS-20 is a MaxMSP compiled application for mac os x that connects to your iMS-20 app through your existing MIDI connection (figure that out ahead of time). It randomizes the parameters of the iMS-20 at an adjustable rate so you can explore different combinations of settings that you might otherwise never run into on your own. It’s pretty random. There aren’t a lot of controls. Think of it as a spelunking tool for this synth. Enjoy!

Download “sCCweet for the Korg iMS-20″

I’ve been working for about 6 months on finding a suitable silicone rubber material to use when making the keys for my beatseqr project. I started on this journey right after I’d set up my blacktoe cnc router. I knew I wanted a clear rubbery material to put in between the LED Tact switches on my circuit board for the user to push. This is a pretty well understood paradigm, so I figured there had to be a low-volume, relatively low-cost way to at least do some research into the feasibility of being able to do this. Of course you never know everything you need to know when you just start stabbing wildly at solving a problem that doesn’t have an obvious solution.  So, below is a small sampling of the attempts I’ve made.

TAP Platinum Silicone

When I started, I thought I knew what I needed. A clear silicone rubber. Right? Should be easy to find. I didn’t really know what exactly to look for, but then I saw that TAP had one! I drove on down to one of my local TAP stores and was a little sticker shocked at the price. Oh well, one credit card swipe later, I was ready to test it out. The product is really simple to use. It’s a 1:1 mix ratio, so you pour parts A and B in equal amounts, mix it all up, and start pouring it into your mold. It’s super runny before it cures so it pours easily.

Once I had tested it out, I realized that there was a critical third qualifying attribute to the silicone that would ultimately win the day: hardness. Smooth-on has an excellent FAQ posted about this topic. It explains everything you need to know and has a printable visual aid. Ok, so with that new knowledge, I can see that this TAP silicone has a Shore hardness of A8, which explains why it feels like floppy gelatin. I’m going for a push button with some give, without being squishy. So this silicone was not going to work. (It did, however, come back later as an excellent mold making material, its intended use anyway.)

Smooth-on Sorta clear 40

So while we were showing Beatseqr at the Bay Area Maker Faire 2010, I was able to locate the Smooth-on booth and discovered a couple of clear silicone rubbers that were MUCH firmer than the silicone I’d tried. Sorta clear 40, and Dragonskin 30. (Note that those product pages contain more than one shore hardness in the same product line!) I figured I’d go with the firmest one they sold, so I located a local dealer and bought a quart sized trial kit of Sorta clear 40.  As you can see from the photo above, the optical properties are excellent with this product.  However, after running a couple of test castings with this product, I discovered a fourth critical qualifying property that I’d need to consider: viscosity.

Sorta clear 40 is an excellent material. I really like it.  It does, however, trap air bubbles… permanently, if you don’t do something about it.  That something you can do is called “degassing”.  Degassing essentially means that you use a vacuum chamber to forcibly remove trapped gasses, usually air, but sometimes other gasses depending on what you’re working with.  Well, I didn’t have a degassing vacuum chamber, and the ones that I found when searching for them seemed to cost multiple hundreds of dollars on the low end, and thousands on the high end. Definitely not within my budget for this test.

I found an article explaining how to build one, so I did that.  I’ll save the explanation for another post, but I managed to cut the price down from $800 down to about US$250.  I’ve always been interested in different materials, and I knew I could use this degassing chamber for other stuff later, so I justified the cost and assembled the parts.  

The viscosity of sorta clear 40 is pretty high, meaning, it does not pour like water. More like honey. Or taffy. The way you combine the 10:1 mix ratio parts is to open the canister of the part A liquid and scoop out 10 parts into a cup on a scale, and then add drops of part B to the mix until you reach the 10:1 ratio. I say “scoop” because the part A liquid is barely a liquid. If you hold the container upside down, it does not pour out. It’s perfectly happy to stay there without pouring at all. When you mix parts A and B together, it does become a somewhat pourable liquid, but before you get there, you have to stir stir stir for 3 minutes to get it fully mixed. Then the material has a bazillion air bubbles in it. So off to the degassing chamber it goes for several minutes, all while the “pot life” is ticking away. Pot life, meaning that you have a certain number of minutes after you combine the parts before they start to cure and solidify, so you need to work pretty quickly to get everything done once you start the process. So, out of the degassing chamber, and into the casting mold, quick!

above, you can see the worst case scenario of rushing to get the silicone into the casting mold, and not being thorough about making sure all of the cavities are filled and big air bubbles are out. Not only does this produce an unusable finished product, it wastes time and money.

Above is a test I ran to mix, degas, pour, and then degas in the mold. It sorta worked. Small bubbles were reduced significantly, but big bubbles formed and by the time the silicone started setting up, they were trapped forever.

Above is another test I ran in a similar fashion. I got pretty good clarity by working faster and leaving more time for the silicone to sit in an uncured state in the mold, but while working feverishly to make sure all big bubbles were eliminated, I overworked the material past the pot life, and so the back of the flange is mottled and uneven. This might be usable, but seems like waaaay too much work to get it right every time.

Originally, the first beatseqrs had acrylic bar stock cut into rectangular shapes and hand sanded to be used as the button interface. The look and feel was pretty good, but the amount of work it took was too much for any kind of mass production, so I thought I’d try a casting acrylic to get the same/similar results without having to do so much hand work finishing. For all of the silicone castings, I am using machinable wax as the negative casting mold. Casting soft rubbery materials into a hard mold is fine, but… you can’t do that for rigid materials. So I made a “master positive” casting out of the TAP silicone, and then a silicone negative from that master positive. Actually, i did two. the first time, I didn’t adequately spray down the master positive with release, and silicone loves being cast on top of silicone, so I adequately destroyed the first silicone negative mold that I needed to do it again. The second silicone negative worked fine, and I was able to do the above casting in the casting acrylic I found at Michael’s.

Ok, BUT … when I went to do the acrylic casting, I discovered the downside to this material immediately. It basically smelled like a chemical factory took a crap, exploded, and died. And it stayed like that for upwards of 3 weeks. I asked a guy from Smooth-on about that and he said it sounded like it was a polyester casting material. Ok, so as pretty as it looks, I will definitely avoid using that again. The jury’s still out on rigid keys… Smooth-on has a material I may run some tests with, but maybe later if some customers dislike the silicone keys. So far, that hasn’t happened too much.

I had these silicone negative molds, and started looking around my garage. I noticed how nice and translucent hot melt glue sticks are. After I realized that silicone would more than withstand the heat, I did a test and got some interesting results. Maybe this is a good fast casting material in some cases. It’s relatively cheap and easy to work with. But… really… not what I was going for.

Enter the dragon. Smooth-on Dragonskin 30, to be precise. While at World Maker Faire 2010 in NYC, I got a great recommendation to try dragonskin 30. It seemed to have the right properties for this need:

1. translucent. Not transparent like sortaclear 40, but early tests indicate that LED light transmission is pretty good, which is what I want.
2. shore hardness A30, which is pretty firm. Not quite as much as sortaclear 40, but firm enough.
3. 1:1 mix ratio, so easy peasy mixing.
4. low viscosity, easy pouring. Less trapped air bubbles, should be easier to degas.
5. good working time and self leveling. Here, take another look:

The flange is super smooth. That lets it sit perfectly flat on the LED Tact buttons so they they’re all seated evenly. There are some air bubbles trapped in the casting, but that’s because I didn’t bother degassing the early tests. I’m confident that if I need to get more clarity in the final castings, degassing will go well because this silicone is so much less viscous than sortaclear 40.

Full castings in the mold cavities. Awesome. Minimal hand-working to get it to that state. Since the material pours much more easily, it doesn’t need much coercion to fill all the nooks. I declare a winner! Dragonskin 30.

There are a few loose ends to tie up on this story, so maybe when I complete all of the research I want to do on this process, I’ll post up the results. I’m hopeful my market for beatseqr is just starting, and I’ll need to keep refining my products to meet demand. If that happens, I will have more to post.

UPDATE … it occurred to me that you might be interested in see what the casting mold looked like (or, one similar to the current one I’m using) and how the casting mold looks when it’s filled, and how the casting looks as it’s coming out of the mold, so here you go!

UPDATE 2: just a reminder to never leave your CNC program running unattended. I stepped away for one minute right at the end of this run, and KABLAM… ruined casting mold. I was lucky it was just 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.

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!

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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.

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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!

Ahh, much better. Much Better. PHEW.

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• 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

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arduino project box construction timelapse from stevecooley on Vimeo.

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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

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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!

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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!

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.

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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.

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