Weekend fun
Saturday I went to the Vancouver Hack Space for our Super Happy Hacker House, a reccuring all-night jam session for makers. Nothing like a good combination of libations and young minds to foster great ideas.
Makelangelo 2.5
I brought along a Makelangelo 2.5 kit that Tom and Kirk put together. It is now a permanent installation in the makerspace so that anyone can make art and experiment with the open source code. I’d love to see someone use conductive ink to draw circuits!
Along the way I took photos every time there was confusion in the instructions. Sunday I added them to the assembly instructions for the pen holder and the motor mount.
90 second lightning talk: Twitch Jigsaw Robot
I feel like I’m on stage performing for The Moth, only a lot faster. Here, now, is the full version of what I wanted to say.
Every New Years my family works on a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Mother likes to buy hard puzzles – like a field of nothing but tiny, two color flowers . We like to think we’re hardcore so we look at the box cover exactly once – when we open the box. Then we dump everything onto a board covered in green felt. The board is so that it can be moved when we’re eating meals. Sometimes we eat while puzzling! It’s a great way to do something together as a family without having to venture into the cold and the wet. Some of my warmest memories as a family are around the table.
…but when the parentals go home to Ottawa I’m usually left with about 600 pieces unfinished.
Now, see, I have a problem: I can’t just put the pieces back in the box. That feels like giving up. I’m not going to let a jigsaw puzzle – an inanimate object – beat me. Sometimes it takes me weeks to finish the damn thing. There must be a faster way! Over time I’ve developed a system to try and speed things up: My first goal is to get every piece face up, in a grid, organized by theme. A theme is anything that ties a group of pieces together, like a strip of color or a recurring pattern. By working on the themed areas I make sub-assemblies that usually get transferred onto the back of an LP record cover and then moved into the puzzle. As the puzzle gets finished the LP record gets used like a Bob Ross’ painter’s pallet, with a selection of interesting pieces that I carry with me as I move around the table, trying to find a match.
Sadly, I feel I’ve reached my limit: there’s no way I, as a human meat thing, can go any faster. Naturally, I’ve thought about making a robot to solve jigsaw puzzles for me. A CNC machine that can pick up and turn pieces could do the job.
I’ll use the GCODECNCDemo library to drive the machine XYZR, where R is rotate and Z is to turn the suction pump on and off. I’ll mount a web cam near the suction pump so the robot can see the puzzle piece as it is being moved. All this machines needs is a brain. Ah, but the brain is the catch! Computer vision is really hard to do and I don’t have the time to do that much work. So I’m going to use the spare brain-power of the internet. It almost feels like cheating!
I found a tutorial about making your own Twitch stream. I’m going to stream the webcam video and let the twitch players drive the machine. All I have to do is arrange the pieces face up and leave the power on.
Final thought
It was great seeing old friends and making new ones. There’s so much raw talent and so many great ideas at the VHS! It is an honor and a privilege to be a part of this great community. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
