Interlock is a non-profit organization that provides space for its members and the local community to develop and share their interests in science, technology, art, and culture.
Surely this will be my last poorly documented project: a hands-free foot operated documentation camera. I thought it’d be handy, and I had an old broken desk lamp kicking around, so of course, the two must be mushed together.
I started out with an old Canon SD1000, with CHDK installed of course. For those in the dark, CHDK is an alternate firmware that works on lots of point and shoot cameras (not just Canon, anymore), and it lets you run scripts, save pictures as raw files, and tweak every setting you could ever possibly want to. It’s awesome, and I needed it so I could trigger the shutter via an external button (you basically toggle +5v on one of the USB port pins).
I didn’t want to worry about running out of batteries mid-shoot, so I printed a dummy battery at Shapeways, ran some wires through it, then tinned and bent over the ends of them to make some pseudo “terminals”. These went out a hole I drilled in the battery door, through the lamp, to a simple 5v voltage regulator, wired up straight out of the datasheet. This 5v source also goes through an old lamp foot switch to the camera’s USB port, for the external trigger.
Finally, I took to the lathe to make an adapter between the weird lamp thread and standard camera tripod thread (1/4″ diameter, 20 threads per inch). I used a bit of round delrin stock, bored out the appropriate diameters, and just cranked a bolt through rather than threading things properly.
I tried a few test shots last night, while I put together Mighty Ohm’s Geiger Counter Kit. It works pretty well, but can’t really zoom in close enough to document very fine work. Hopefully it will still be useful for documenting other tasks that require both your hands in frame. Failing that, I’m sure there will be other uses for a scriptable camera attached to a flexible-yet-solid base… perhaps it will turn into a time-lapse-bot.
Have you heard about Maker Faire? Probably. Well, this year, a group of us including three Interlock Members ended up going down to Queens for Maker Faire NYC 2011.
AntiTree:
Personally I don’t really consider myself a maker and have always been in the infosec hacker realm. I go to hacker cons like Defcon but Maker Faire was a new intense gathering of super positive people. Where else can you say you saw a giant hydrolic fire breathing dragon next to a one man drum corp.
Really the only reason I went down was to volunteer at the TOOOL booth with a couple of friends. I spent the weekend teaching kids and adults how to pick locks. I’ll just say that I don’t hang around kids very much but teaching an 8 year old how to pick locks was pretty freaking cool. But the highlight of my weekend was teaching an NYPD officer how to pick a master lock.
I’ve been taking up quite a bit of space at Interlock lately with my new toy, a Roland DPX-3300 pen plotter… delivered via ebay from the magical futurepast of the early nineties. For those that are out of the loop with the past century, pen plotters are two axis robo-thingamajigs that basically pick up pens and draw on paper with them. They’ve been replaced by wide-format inkjet printers, but they used to be quite popular with anybody who wanted to plot out maps, blueprints, and other large diagrams.
Anyways, somehow I caught the plotter bug, even going so far as to learn a bit of python after finding this neat library called Chiplotle that handles the basics of creating and streaming artwork to plotters using their native language of HPGL. They have a mailing list where they often point out good plotter deals on ebay, and I foolishly/accidentally purchased perhaps the biggest flatbed plotter out there. 3×2 feet of plotting goodness, 100 pounds of steel and stepper motors delivered to my door by a grumpy UPS driver.
After realizing it doesn’t fit anywhere in my house, I brought it to Interlock and have been tinkering with it since. The first step was to convert old dried out plotter pens into pen holders that would allow me to use Sharpies or other art pens with the device. That involved a quick trip to the lathe, which I hope to document more fully in the future.
Having figured out an inexpensive pen solution, I really wanted to make drawings based on webcam input… so I trawled around the internet and mailing lists until I could piece together a passable solution using OpenCV’s python bindings, and a series of nerdy unixy commands (convert, autotrace, and pstoedit) to trace, mush, and output the data. You can find the relevant code up on my Ronald Toys Github repository.
Having conquered such menial tasks, I decided that the default route the plotter was taking was quite inefficient, with lots of time spent seeking back and forth between lines. My precious robot was spending half its time flailing due to a poorly composed hpgl file. Surely there was a better way.
Tada! I wrote a really dumb sort routine that attempts to minimize seeking between lines, instead of blindly accepting the order that autotrace wrote them in. You can see the difference in the following two time-lapse videos. The first shows the default route that autotrace produces, and the second is my optimized version.
Next step for this project: some more sophisticated drawing routines, including some cross-hatched shading, color, and maybe even some 3D input from a Kinect. Stop in for a Tuesday Open Night and maybe you can be a robo-portrait guinea pig!
Last week, I drove a car full of Interlocutors down to Lima, NY to visit Smidgens, Inc., our friendly local laser manufactory. I wanted to get some parts cut out of half-inch plywood for the Mantis 9.1 CNC mill we’re building. Although the parts are designed to be easily cut by hand, I really wanted an excuse to see some big-ass lasers and to make the acquaintance of those in charge of said equipment. So off we went. Keep scrolling for pictures and some commentary.
Gary – the co-owner of Smidgens, along with his wife Rita – gave us quite an extensive tour, and answered all of our pesky questions while we gawked at the machinery. Above, you can see one of their lasers cutting crane parts out of quarter-inch steel. I was pretty surprised how quiet the whole operation was, given the amount of cutting going on. Most of the noise was from the ventilation systems that were constantly huffing smoke out to the great outdoors.
Sorry for the butt-shot, but here’s an overall view of the main space. There’s one more marking laser in another room off to the right, and the metal-cutting laser is to your left. They also have a bit of storage in the corner for commonly used materials.
They had three lasers like the above, and these mostly do wood and acrylic cutting and etching. I failed to shoot the 8-ish foot long laser tube, the massive power supply, and the ridiculously beefy stepper (servo?) motors driving the XY tables. So sorry. It really made the nerds go all giggity.
Bread. Dried, lasered, lacquered. It’s a miracle! Rita does some fun stuff with the lasers that I’m sure their engineers hadn’t anticipated.
This machine was solely for cutting thin materials or marking things at an insane speed. Instead of moving the entire workpiece or optics in an XY fashion, it has two mirrors that remain stationary and just twiddle the beam to and fro. The design you see above took about ten or fifteen seconds to cut.
And here are the parts! Time for assembly… soon enough we’ll be milling circuit boards in-house at Interlock. Thanks again, Gary, for cutting our parts and taking the time to show us your lasers!
Join us this Friday, November 12th at 8pm for another stimulating night of lightning talks at Interlock! Lightning talks are five minute(-ish) presentations on whatever topic you’re passionate about, and we try to get through fifteen or twenty of them in a night. The event is free and open to the public, and anybody is welcome to present. We’ll have some food and beverage on hand to stimulate digestion and discussion.
If you’re going to present, and need to get slides situated, please show up a little early and/or mail your slides to info@interlockroc.org sometime before the event. We encourage a wide variety of topics… not just tech-oriented subjects. Previous talks have been about lockpicking, homebrewing, bookbinding, artificial intelligence, basic electronics, laser cutting, and on and on. Teach us something new!
Here is our Googley Maps page where you can get directions to the space. Once you get into the parking lot of the Hungerford building, you’ll want to look for Door #1 and head down into the basement to find us.
Also, if you are on the Facebooks, please do RSVP to our event on said site, so we can calculate pizza ingestion and seating requirements. See you this Friday!
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