Oval Gears

The past two days I have been building Oval gears, with a laser etcher.


I found this at Thingiverse.com, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:205 . I decided to cut it out of acrylic with the laser cutter, because well I have one to use, for the time being. I downloaded the file included and fired the laser! This came out.



It was a prototype. The spacing on the brackets was too close together, and the whole thing would shatter violently... Yay for prototyping! I'm pretty sure the problem lied in the fact that the laser made too little waste and the teeth meshed together and stressed the whole brace. So trial and error (x30) later I came out with my working model. Lots of help from a wonderful man, Ronald Hofman. He has helped me tremendously throughout the whole process. Thank you very much.

Laser Etched MacBook Pro

Today I etched my MacBook Pro, with a Laser.

First off, Huge thanks to the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and to the wonderful people here who let me do this. Currently here for a bit over the summer, at a program called Operation Catapult.

While working here I asked if I could use the Pinnacle laser etcher to etch my MacBook Pro, and they said yes.

Firstly I edited the image in Photoshop and then over to Illustrator to turn it into vector art, out to a high resolution BMP, and off to the laser's computer.


After that, the image was scaled and put into place, my MacBook Pro's borders were put into the computer and then the machine had to think for a little while. But after that a sheet of construction paper was laid down to test out the image and to make sure everything was ok to go onto my laptop for forever.

(Sorry its so blurry)

The trial went very well so my MBP was loaded into the machine and off it went.

Another Final pic, I love looking at this.

Brownies

Today I made a stop-motion video of some brownies. Enjoy!



Ingredients:
Box-o-brownies
2 eggs
Oil*
H2O

*I used melted clarified butter. They brownies would have been more "fluffy" with oil, but working with available resources is an aspect of DIY.

Tools:
Nikon D50
iStopMotion
Adobe Premiere Pro

**So Premiere Pro is completely overkill for a simple audio overlay into a video, but any will work. iStopMotion is a wonderful program that allows users to create stop-motion videos.

Process:
During the process of making brownies, I took photos during each step. I took 451 photos for 37 seconds of footage, this isn't a strict rate of photos per second, so play around. Trial and error is a large part of DIY, and if you really enjoy the project a lot of fun. Tip, take a lot of photos, more than you'll think you'll need, you can always remove photos or speed up the footage, very hard to add in more pictures.

After all the pictures were taken, I uploaded them into iStopMotion. From there I made a 37 second video and exported it over to Premiere Pro. Then I added in some fun music, and presto video done.

I Haven't Died

Content on the way, sorry for the outage.