I’ve recently been dealing with a lot of arcade controls at work and wanted to talk about how much I like All Fight Sticks product. I’ll also take the time to talk about some of my past and future arcade projects. Continue reading
Category Archives: Portfolio
Here are many of the projects I’ve worked on over the years.
Rocket Lamp
While surfing Grand Brass (the goto place for traditional lighting parts) I stumbled across a few parts that made me think I could build a lamp that looks like an old timey rocket; so I did! I was looking at their frosted glass flame shades thinking I could make something Lumière like when I saw their brass clusters looking very engine like. Combining that with the classic flame-effect neon bulbs and we were off to the space races. Continue reading
Fun with thermal receipt printers
I gave a talk last week at Spec.la about playing with thermal receipt printers, which you can watch above. Here is some more information about the project: Continue reading
Growing chandeliers
A couple years ago when I was designing some double helix light fixtures (I realize that’s another post I need to write) I stumbled across Grand Brass, the McMaster-Carr of lamp parts. Until that point I didn’t realize that traditional lamps, sconces, chandeliers, are built from standardized modular parts. The backbone of these builds is made of hollow threaded pipe available in 1/2 inch increments. It looks like they’ve expanded their FAQs to cover the whys of this particular threading, to the anatomy of a sconce, and many other tips like fishing wires with a pull chain. Continue reading
LED matrix hoodie update
I took my LED matrix hoodie back to XOXO last year and, as shown above, it totally worked this time! This time I used a PixelPusher as mentioned in the previous post so I could hand people my iPad mini to play with the display. I powered it using just USB batteries this time. The matrix has stood up well over the years. I’ve only had to replace the initial pigtail and I’ve used it with several different controllers. Although it might be time to retire it. Or attempt to wash it for the first time ever…
The Space Camp animated LED sign
Last summer my friend Laura planned an elaborate surprise birthday party for her boyfriend Eric. We took over a private high desert campsite, built a UFO DJ booth, dance floor, and other alien activity areas. One of the main attractions we built was the animated LED Space Camp sign. Continue reading
Nerf flywheel gun modding
I haven’t been paying attention to Nerf guns for many years. While they still use spring powered air pistons for many of their blasters (the official term) their product line now includes electromechanical guns. Essentially a pitching machine for foam darts. I decided to buy myself one for Christmas to do some hacking.
Dry erase shipping containers
Delible Goods, 2015
This was a project I had been thinking about for a while but finally came together last summer. I really like shipping containers and graffiti so I wanted to make a reusable canvas you could doodle on.
Christmas tree hexapod dancing alone to Ginuwine’s Pony
A couple weeks ago I had a strong desire to get a six legged robot, stick a tiny tree on it, and make it dance… so I did exactly that. The Hexy I started with came from my friend Arko and I took advantage of it being open source to print the new parts I needed. I set the whole thing to the tune of Ginuwine’s Pony since YouTube is chock full of sexy dancing to that song. You can find the video embedded below and my friend Taylor Hatmaker — who loves robots — was able to suss a few more details of the build out of me for her post. Continue reading
Robotic paintball turrets
I got to work on an interesting project for Toyota’s Make Your Mark campaign for the new Corolla. We built 2 robotic turrets with 3 paintball guns on each. The pan and tilt movement is driven by 2 Tormach rotary tables; these usually act as a 4th axis on a CNC mill. The paintball guns already had solenoid driven triggers but we adapted them for remote control. We also monitored the gun ball sensors to determine if a paintball was in the chamber. The guns are driven using G-code like any CNC machine. You can see a video of it in action below where it’s painting every time it receives a tweet. More photos from the event are on Flickr. Continue reading
RobotSkirts 