A Maker Wedding

This post is a little late in coming, but this past March I married a wonderful and patient woman, Beth.  For our wedding we wanted to keep costs low and still make it very personalized, so we did all of the planning and made several custom pieces for our special day.  We planned color schemes, table settings, and the hall layout using InkScape - an open source SVG editor, and Beth made beautiful blue and black ribbon table squares for the centerpieces. I designed 3D printed candle holders, and custom ties for my groomsmen presents.

More details and fancy bits after the break.

JunkPOV

For his Embedded Programming (RBT211) project this semester Ryan Carmain built a POV display using junk from around our hardware lab - principally the motor assembly of a Draganflyer (yes, those are propellers):

Video and source code after the break.

Graffiti Analysis Sculptures

Graffiti Analysis: 3D from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Graffiti Analysis: Sculptures is a series of new physical sculptures that I am making from motion tracked graffiti data. New software (GA 3D) imports .gml files (Graffiti Markup Language) captured using Graffiti Analysis, creates 3D geometry based on the data and then exports a 3D representation of the tag as a .stl file (a common file format compatible with most 3D software packages including Blender, Maya and 3DS Max). Time is extruded in the Z dimension and pen speed is represented by the thickness of the model at any given point. I then have this data 3D printed to create a physical sculpture that serves as a data visualization of the tag. For the Street and Studio exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wein, I collaborated with an anonymous local Viennese graffiti writer and had the GA sculpture printed in ABS plastic. Graffiti motion data of his tag was captured in the streets (for the first time) at various points around Vienna.

More information (including software, source code, and many more pictures) can be found at Evan's website.

3D Printed UAT Shadow Sculpture

Last week I built this shadow sculpture inspired by the cover of the Pulitzer-prize winning book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" this is a 3D-printed form that casts three orthogonal shadows in the shapes of the letters UAT.    After I printed it, I used some blue LEDs and foam-core to build a little display platform for it.

Here is the Inventor part file: UATCube.ipt

Laser Command

Laser Command from Eiji Hayashi on Vimeo.

This awesome project was built by Eiji Hayashi at Carnegie Mellon University.  What stands out is the use of LED's as both display and input.  The full design is available here.

RBT173 Final Project: Text-to-Speech Twitter Robot

This is Andre Walker's final project for my course RBT173 - Introduction to Microcontrollers. The project is a text-to-speech robot that mimics emotions and reads specially tagged twitter messages out loud. It is a modified version of the GanzBot project.

Spinning RGB LED Ball

Unlike it’s predecessor this one has three axes. It was very challenging to build, with a total of 9 slip-contacts, not including the motors. I made it from scrap I had laying around and it took about a week to build. I use standard DC-motors controlled with pulse width modulation, the LEDs are controlled with a modified bike light with adjustable frequency.

More pictures via HackedGadgets

RBT173 - Simple Simon Game

Here is another lab demonstration from some of my students in RBT173 - "Introduction to Micro-controllers."



The goal of the laboratory was to construct and program a simple breadboard "Simon" style game.  Some of the challenges of this lab were construction of input and output circuits, and generating a random sequence of light blinks.  The most challenging part of this lab for most students was recognizing user input and determining whether it matched the generated quiz sequence.

64 Pixel Mario

Super Mario Bros on an 8x8 LED matrix from Chloe Fan on Vimeo.

Chloe Fan has blown our minds by showing that you only need 64 pixels to have a little fun with Super Mario Bros.

Via Make.

FlyFire: Distributed UAV Display

MIT FlyFire Project