ELE-0033 Bare Conductive Paint Pens have special ink that conducts electricity. Stick some LEDs and a battery to a piece of cardboard, then draw your circuit and the lights will work! This is great for architecture students who want to light their models. Surface Mount PCB prototyping has never been this cheap and fast.
This is one of my first Laser cutting experiments. Even though this isn’t the best example of what I can cut I feel it’s worth sharing because it helped me get a lot better. I needed a large piece to test the cutting quality across the entire work area of the machine. I also love jigsaws and puzzles, so when I saw this on Thingiverse I knew I had to make one for myself. In several spots the beam didn’t cut all the way through and there was a bit of burning. That showed me where to adjust the settings and fine-tune the calibration.
After cutting the parts I used masking tape to hold it together while I riddled it out. Once it looked right I put a few drops of contact cement on each corner to finish the job.
Now here’s a question about appearances: If it were you, would you show this version or would you re-cut it and only show the perfect second copy? Some people say I look less confident or less skilled because I show work in progress. I think it’s more honest and educational to show how I got where I am. I might have problem but they don’t include confidence issues. What do you think? Please comment.
ELE-0034 Raspberry Pi Model B is a full computer the size of a credit card. Add a keyboard and mouse to use it on the spot or simply connect a network cable to run it over the web. We have successfully run Apache web servers on the office Pi and at our local hackspace a Pi runs the MAME arcade machine with 3000 video games.
RPis do not have a hard drive. Instead they use SD cards. This model includes an 8GB SD card preloaded with Noobs firmware. Plug in your Raspberry, follow the on screen prompts, and you will have one of several flavors of linux running in just a few minutes.
The Pi has two USB connectors – enough for a keyboard and mouse. The Pi also has two kinds of video output and is powered by a micro USB cable.
You may also want a DVI to HDMI cable, a micro USB cable, or a USB powered hub.
3D printers, laser cutters, water jet cutters, robot arms, delta robots, stewart platforms, the Makelangelo: all of these are examples of computer numerical control (CNC) machines. CNC machines need to move accurately and on command. Stepper motors are a great way to move accurately – they move a predictable amount and then stay where you put them. To command the stepper motors we need a way to easily turn our human desires into machine instructions into stepper motor steps. In effect we need our robot brain to be an interpreter. I’m going to show you a simple interpreter written for Arduino that lets you move stepper motors for your robots.
