Author Archives: mechatronicsguy

I spent a bit of time recently help a friend set up a robotics lab. One of the things I wanted to nail down was a consistent set of coordinate frames for all the equipment. The Robot Operating System is … Continue reading →

I’ve been getting interested in plein air oil painting recently, not so coincidentally after Netflix brought out some inspiration. As with any set of tools, painting equipment only has value if you actually use it, and lots of hobbies get dropped, … Continue reading →

Quick and dirty post showing something I made this morning to aid in troubleshooting the filtration system at Robots and Dinosaurs. Members from RnD have been building and rebuilding our own lasercutters for years. Mostly building our own because we got … Continue reading →

Here’s a quick project I had the idea for after reading that the “swear bleep” sound is actually fairly standardized at 1,000Hz. Using a Teensy & audio shield, I soldered on a microphone scavenged from the junk drawer.  With a half … Continue reading →

I’ve recently gotten into Change Ringing, and helped a friend build a bell simulator from a broken bell that was laying around. “Full Circle” bell ringing is a bit counter intuitive. Rather than having the mouth of the bell face … Continue reading →

  This is the true reason for my previous project on Platonic Solids. I was playing around with map projections, and became a tag smitten with Buckminster FulIer’s Dymaxion Projection. It’s able to do a map projection with surprisingly little distortion: … Continue reading →

This started because I wanted to make my own copy of Buckminster Fuller’s  Dymaxion Map. Lasercutting mitre joints & gluing them leads to big seam lines on the map, as well as being hard to hold while gluing. Instead, I decided to … Continue reading →

Are you sick of having to work out the Collatz Sequence by hand? Run out of whiteboard space? Hand cramping up with all your scribbling? Then you need my latest project, the Collatz-O-Matic!: This came about because after the previous posts on Cellular … Continue reading →

Continuing my cellular automata theme, I’ve just finished a device to allow some hands on play, and exploration of the space of 1D cellular automata. I spent a while thinking on the interface, and settled on the row of switches … Continue reading →