When I was a kid I was gifted a vintage slot car track. Its was an early 70’s Riggen brand 1/32 scale set : two cars, two controllers, and a decent amount of track. I still have it and I occasionally pull it out and play with it. Last weekend the weather was pretty nasty outside so I decided to have some fun with it. I thought it would be cool to make a little MATLAB app that would let me create and edit track layouts before I put everything together.
I really enjoy cooking with fresh herbs or making the occasional side salad. However, I hate going to the grocery store and buying a huge container of field greens or basil, only to have half of it rot in the refrigerator before I get to eat it. I thought a much better solution would be to grow my own herbs and greens and then pick them as I need them. This way I would always have the very freshest ingredients, without any waste or extra trips to the grocery store.
On my single speed bike, I run front and rear brakes. However the frame doesn’t have cable routing bosses on the top tube. Right now I just have the cable housing zip-tied to the frame. This isn’t a very elegant solution and I wanted to improve it.
Problem Solvers makes a nice clamp that will route two cables. Unfortunately they don’t make them to fit my 1.0 inch top tube. Carnegie Mellon has a 3D printer and I had always wanted to experiment with rapid prototyping parts. It is very easy to design a part in Solidworks and then export it to the 3D printer. I thought I could design and fabricate something to fit my need.
Versions 1 through 5, left to right.
Continue reading “Backstop Rapid Prototyping”
I never got around to posting about my time at Georgia Tech’s Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access (CATEA), where I was a researcher and shop manager. CATEA designs and tests all sorts of technology to help disabled people. The entire lab is a sort of skunk works operation; imagine Myth Busters “what crazy thing do you want to try today”. I was responsible for bringing to life the ideas and inventions of several Georgia Tech professors and their grad students. I had an entire shop at my disposal and best of all a Georgia Tech VISA card!
Continue reading “Past Work: Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access”
I received this wooden tool chest as a bonus for buying some old furniture from an out-of-business machine shop. It was sitting around for a while and I didn’t know what to do with it. I had the idea that it would be cool for something and, in full pack-rat mentality, I’d hung on to it for several years.
A fair amount of my recent projects have been what you might call stupidly-attentive-to-detail. I’ve usually obsessed about having every wire cut to length and soldered perfectly. I have delayed a project while I waited for that one perfect $2.00 part to arrive in the mail. I realized this was queuing up my project list and creating quite a bit of frustration. I was actually not getting any enjoyment from side projects. So, I decided to have a little hack project and get something running in a single evening.
