Archive for the ‘Hotlinks’ Category

[Hotlinks] – Cool stuff this week (2010.01.17 -> 2010.01.23)

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

Engineering:

Mujahid Abdulrahim at the University of Florida has an SAE white paper on the sports of drifting:

Same dude also has 1000fps footage from a Phantom High Speed camera of Mini-Z racers crashing on YouTube. What a cool guy.

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TechRestore has a cool series of stop-motion photography of various gadgets being unboxed, disassembled and reassembled. Here’s one of the iPhone 3GS going under the knife. They have a behind the scenes look at how these are done here.

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Tormach CNC has a really innovative tool in beta – combining a USB microscope with a CNC mill. It’s part vision based CMM, part machine setup tool. The last part is key – you can reverse engineer a part, and machine a new part using the same tool to setup / reference features already on an existing part.

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Food:

Garett Kern, of Garett’s Table, has a totally out of this world take on the classic Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich.

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Food Pairing is an awesome website for exploring different food pairing options.

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[Hotlinks] – Cool arduino projects

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

It’s no secret that flying had always been a childhood dream of mine, and that I’ve wanted to combine flying models and my photography skills to do some aerial photography. Here are links to some DIY flying machines that people have built.

They belong to a class of flying machines called quadcopters – made only possible with recent advances in MEMS electronics (specifically, accelerometers, electronic gyros, and microprocessors). These are classic examples of fly-by-wire machines where a computer evaluates the flying conditions thousands of times per second and provides mid-course corrections, while a human pilot tells the computer where he or she wants to go.

http://aeroquad.info/bin/view
- an Arduino-based quad-copter, built from Align 600-series helicopter tail booms, brushless motors and propellers. An Align T-Rex600’s landing skid provides lander support.

http://quaduino.org/
- Another Arduino quad copter. Looks like a custom airframe.

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[Fail] – Toner transfer for “photo”-etch

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Well, no project always go 100% smoothly, and the important thing when one fails, is to document the failure.

Tried to use a toner-transfer method to do a photo-resist mask tonight, to chem-etch a brass face plate for a couple of pieces of photography that I’m framing up for presentation / sales. I’ve done this before in college doing DIY PCBs and earlier on in high school for model airplanes.

The process involves mirror-inverting a photo negative of the mask pattern and then printing it out on a photocopier. Because toner is a thermoplastic, a regular clothes iron can be used to remelt the toner and transfer it to another medium – balsa wood for cutting (this is before laser cutters) or, in my case, a sheet of brass plate from K&S Engineering in Chicago for a name plate.

Turns out I forgot that you need special paper. Toner sticks really well to regular paper (no surprise):

Blogged: http://www.TerenceTam.com

Oh, and it helps to turn the steam off on the clothes iron. :-)

I think this is the stuff that I used in college. I’m placing an order tomorrow for a small sample, shipped pony express (ground) from Florida. So, check back in a week to see how it went.

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