One of the things I made for Christmas gifts this year were candles. In addition to the typical cylinder and square candles, I made some candles in the form of the Gears omen and a lime.
For my first time making molds, and first time pouring candles, I’m really happy with how things came out.
A neat little Scrabble board that I made and took on my vacation trip:
A word to the wise: orange and red Sharpies are nearly indistinguishable from each other on a frosted plexiglass medium.
Finished Robotender Mk3 just in time for my halloween party (with literally minutes to spare). This one is a pretty radical departure from the previous designs, using a robotic arm instead of pressurized dispensing. I managed to pick up a Scorbot ER-III arm and controller off of eBay. They were originally used for teaching robotics and motion planning at universities, and are generally pretty used-and-abused (two motors were almost falling out of their mounts on this one), but it runs quite nicely after everything was cleaned and tightened up.
It’s a little slow compared to the Mk1, but it’s a lot of fun to watch, can hold more bottles, and is easier to maintain. It uses custom bottle carriers that hold 710 mL soda bottles, and can hold up to 24 such bottles. There is a digital scale hooked up to the computer as well, which gets zeroed once a bottle reaches the pour site, letting it determine how much liquid has been poured much more accurately than the simple time-based approach used in Mk1.
I took a number of pictures during construction on this one, so I may do a build log post later.
Next steps:
I pulled an all-nighter and designed/fabricated a LED edge lighting box plus etched plate in advance of the Gears 3 launch. The original plan was to slide an unused junk android tablet in and show some numbers from the stats dashboard in that central window, but I wasn’t able to get the tablet on the secure network at work, so now it’s just a pretty light box sitting on my desk. I almost slid my iPad in, but the slot I machined for the tablet is about 0.5 in too short for an iPad, though it had 0.75 in of slack for the target tablet.
The light gently pulsates / undulates around the border (driven by an Arduino), aiming to look a bit like the corrupted omen on the title screen.
The LED strip I used are LPD8806 driven strips from Adafruit, and they are a dream to use compared to the older Christmas light strand style strips I’ve used in the past. Each LED is individually addressable via a SPI-like interface to set a 21 bpp RGB color, and they have their own internal PWM clock, so you can fire and forget, no need to keep clocking them.
Also, Gears of War 3 is out, you should play it!
A friend of mine recently got a house in Raleigh and dubbed it “The Happy House”. As a housewarming gift and as a test of my new CNC, I wanted to carve a plaque for the place.
I tried to think of something that brings irrational happiness to people and settled on Nyan Cat. It took a little bit of design work, resulting in a nice and fast CNC run, but painting it took longer than I expected. Even so, it turned out quite nice and everyone at the happy house loved it.
I took 3rd place in the minimalist category of the 555 timer compo for my persistence of vision display. I’d also like to thank Allerta and CafeLogic for sponsoring the compo and the cool prizes (an iPulse watch and a box o displays).
I gave a talk at the East Coast Game Conference this year titled “Guided Content Optimization for Gears of War 3”, which went over pretty well. The slides are available here.
The talk was about the processes and tools that we developed/extended to help make Gears of War 3, covering our philosophy, memory and performance feedback loops, and some of the tools that help gather, process, or visualize performance data.
The talk was intended for a more general audience, but there are lots of UE3 specific documents on UDN that dive into more detail:
I’m moving my content over from Joomla to WordPress manually, so it may take a bit before everything has been transferred.
This is an audiovisual instrument that I created for the 555 timer contest.
The Glitchovision 3000 is a 4 step sequencer controlling an ‘Atari Punk‘ synth with a greyscale NTSC video visualization of the output audio, built using two 558 quad-timers and two 556 dual-timers.
Here is a video of it in action:
Continue reading “Glitchovision 3000”