Make: Online: Toolbox Archives

Toolbox Archive: Toolbox

November 6, 2009

Cupcake CNC build part 1: Introduction & background

Having just arrived home from a quick trip to the hardware store, I was pleasantly surprised to see a large, unmarked, cardboard box sitting on my front steps. This isn't an uncommon event, since I am constantly checking out cool products and projects for the Maker Shed, however this box was a bit larger than normal.

Oh wow, it's the Cupcake CNC kit from MakerBot Industries! I'd ordered it weeks earlier and had completely forgotten about it. (The truth is out: I have an atrocious memory, sad but true.)

And so the adventure begins! I'm going to document my "out of box experience" with a MakerBot. How many posts will the series be? I'm not sure since I've never built one. How often will I post about the build? Again, not sure, but I'll try to do at least one a week, maybe more, it all depends on how much free time I have between all my other maker-ly projects.

A little background: My CNC experiences

I've been tinkering with CNC for about 10 years, and consider myself an enthusiast, not an expert. I do own a few CNC mills, routers, and lathes. I have retrofitted old mills, and even build one from scratch. Pictured above is my mobile CNC machine, dubbed the "MobileC." I stuffed all the components into a mobile tool cart so I could bring it to hackerspaces, workshops, and events, all in the hopes of helping out fellow makers.

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November 2, 2009

Bandsaw beautification

The first time I saw a circuit board where the board designer had broken through the boundaries of a grid pattern and made traces that curved playfully and made decorative shapes, it was a revelation. You can make a PCB any damn shape you please! (So long as it takes into account the component shapes, circuit design requirements, and doesn't get too confusing.) Too often we get stuck in rigid modes of thinking about the world. I love it when people tweak those tunnel realities a little. This painted saw, spotted on Dinosaurs and Robots, is a perfect example. I've seen a few shop tools maybe painted a non-factory-issued color, or with some bumper stickers and tool company logos, etc. on them, but have never seen one tricked-out painted just for fun and aesthetic pleasure. Why not? This saw was done by custom guitar painter Sarah Ryan, for Creston Lea's bandsaw.

Okay, here's one reason not to paint your shop tools. It apparently attracts snakes! (See story on the link.)

Creston Lea's Bandsaw Painted by Sarah Ryan

October 30, 2009

Lie-Nielsen chain-drive shoulder vise

There are vises, and there are vises. And there are those of us for whom vises are also vices. For we few ~~obsessives~~ cognoscenti, the price of this beautifully-designed chain-drive shoulder vise package may not be unreasonable. For the mechanically inclined, a remake would be totally do-able, and Lie-Nielsen is to be credited for not keeping any secrets about how it all goes together. The installation instructions (.pdf) contain all you'd need to know to cobble together one of your own.

October 28, 2009

Toolboxes: now and then

Flickr toolbox refurbisher extraordinaire "txinkman" got ahold of this awesome Black & Decker box and had no idea what it originally held. He posted a query on Toolmonger and soon found out: a valve seat grinding set. About the box itself, he writes:

Just for giggles, I shot it next to my orbital sander's box. Somehow I think we've lost some packaging elan over the years.

Boy, howdy.

txinkman's photostream

October 26, 2009

MicroRAX modular beams

Looks like the small-scale aluminum t-slot world his heating up! Previously I've recommended 80/20 for small projects that needed sturdy, precise framing structures to hold up a microcontroller and some sensors, but those can be difficult to find in small sizes. Now we've got MicroRAX from Twintec, and Mini-T by Maker Beam on the way soon. Both are a 10mm square stock with a variety of connectors, joints, and hardware. They are aimed at makers, with direct sales, and small kits of common parts.

MicroRAX are available for purchase now, and you can contact them for free samples if you'd like to play around with some. I spoke with Chris Burrows from Twintec and he said they're ready for an onslaught of sample orders, so bring it on!

I'm excited to see that they've uploaded CAD files for two of their parts to Thingiverse, so you can plan your project in 3D. Head here to download them. Hopefully they'll add CAD files for all of their parts soon.

[via HackedGadgets]

More:
Q & A with MakerBeam @ Evil Mad Science Laboratories

Electricity-free table saw

Well, I'm convinced. This quiet and electricity-free table saw, the Jointmaker Pro R2 by Bridge City Tool Works has a small bead of drool forming on my lip, not even halfway through the demo video. [via Core77]

Graffiti marker disguised as cigarette

I recently ordered some refillable paint pens from Art Primo, and this was in the box as a freebie. It's the exact size, shape, and color as a cigarette, and among a dozen real cigarettes in a pack it'd likely pass any search completely unnoticed. It took me a minute to figure out its nefarious purpose: If you get caught in the vicinity of a fresh tag, after all, it's best not to be found with a marker on your person. They're manufactured by Germany's On The Run, but you won't find them on their website. The one I got was gold; the silver ones below were photographed by Flickr user $30,000.

How-To: Compressed air system for haunt props

Good tutorial on putting together a pneumatic power system for "home imagineering," as as the folks at Phantasmechanics call it. We've blogged their stuff a couple times before.

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Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

October 23, 2009

A better way to slice a pumpkin

Subscriber Michael Williams wrote in with this clever modification of the traditional pumpkin incision. He explains the logic:

For years now I've been unhappy with the choices for cutting open a pumpkin for Halloween. If you cut the top off in the traditional manner, you end up with singed hand hairs (at best) when attempting to place/light a candle. If you cut the bottom off, you can get the candle in OK but you're stuck picking up nearly the whole pumpkin each time and it never sits quite right. This year is different - I've found the perfect pumpkin cut!

Thanks Michael!

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

October 22, 2009

Automatic image index-maker software

matt_mets_things_in_my_kitchen (Custom).jpg

Our own Matt Mets put me onto this program called Montage from the open-source ImageMagick suite. Shown above is Matt's image "Things in my kitchen," and here is the command line to Montage that produced it:

montage +frame +shadow +label -tile 10x8 -borderwidth 1 -background white -bordercolor white -geometry 200x133 *.jpg stuff.jpg

As you can see, Montage takes all the work out of combining a bunch of individual images into an array of images, dealing automatically with all the resizing, cropping, arranging, and/or labeling headaches automatically.

Below is my own experiment with the software, "A visual guide to necklines," which I made because I never have any idea how to describe women's clothes.

Montage arrayed the images, added drop shadows, and labeled them based on their file names automatically. The only real work involved was tracking down the images online and saving them as appropriately-named files, but it wouldn't be hard to write a script to do that, either. Then one could conceivably go from a typed list of nouns to a complete visual index of those nouns completely automatically.

From BoobTube to SmartTube

Tired of reading all of those racist, anti-Semitic, gross, nasty, hateful, and just plain dirt-dumb stupid comments on YouTube? Now you can make everyone as smart as a rocket scientist, or at least as smart as a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and prankster, juggler, painter, bongo player, and lock-picker), namely Richard Feynman.

FeynTube is a Greasemonkey script that replaces all YouTube comments when quotes from Feynman. You can switch off FeynTube simply by switching off the Greasemonkey icon at the bottom of your browser.

The FeynTube page describes how to install both Greasemonkey and the FeynTube script. [Thanks, Blake!]

More:
Richard Feynman Video
Feynman and ants
Cross-Stitch Your Favorite Physicist
Richard Feynman: The Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures

October 19, 2009

Bildr: componentized, crowdsourced DIY how-tos

What Bildr is attempting to do is very admirable. It makes good sense. It will be glorious, if it happens. Something similar has been talked about in tech DIY circles for years. The idea is to create a visual Web-based library of componentized instruction sets, "building blocks," for doing various hardware and software constructions. Put a bunch of these components together, and you have all of the instructions you need to execute a multi-part project. It's extraordinarily ambitious, but when you look at other crowdsourced creations, such as Instructables and Wikipedia, it just seems so doable. But to make it happen, it'll need LOTS of love, care, sweat-equity, money, and people power. Let's hope it happens, 'cause... how cool would such a resource be?

October 15, 2009

How-To: PVC pipe vacuum dust separator

Instructables user neorazz has posted a tutorial on how to build a dust separator attachment for your shop vac. It is described as "cyclonic," which it may or may not actually be (see the comments), but it does, apparently, work quite well at separating out the heavier bits of flotsam (which end up in the bucket) from the actual dust (which goes on to the vacuum).

October 14, 2009

IFixit's sponsored blender teardown

Now this is a welcomed development. The company Blendtec provided iFixIt with one of their Total Blenders to take apart and document. As you know, we're always prattling on about "If You Can't Open It, You Don't Own It" and other litanies from The Maker's Bill of Rights. This is a company that apparently understands these rights. Looking at the teardown docs and watching the video, you can see that the blender is well made, with user-accessible parts, clearly marked circuit boards, etc. They obviously know they have a quality, intelligently-designed product, which is why they're not afraid to subject it to public inspection. Let's hope this starts a trend.

Blendtec Total Blender Teardown

October 13, 2009

The Day The Earth Stood Still toolbox

Paul Overton, of the most-splendid DudeCraft, sent us this mosaic toolbox project. He was asked by someone doing a book on "geek crafts" to submit something, and this is what he came up with, an homage to Gort and The Day the Earth Stood Still, accomplished via bits of paper cut from junk mail and magazines. Awesome idea. Stunning results.

Gort - Klaatu Barada Nikto

Help me write my next Toolbox column

The theme for my next Make: Online Toolbox column is "Maker Sartorial," looking at clothing and accessories as tools for makers. In other words, what shirts, pants, shoes, belt pouches/holsters, pocket-contents, etc. do you carry, either when you're at work, engaged in your hobbies, or otherwise doing makery type stuff, whether for work or pleasure. For some of us, the deeper geeks in the house, this might be what we wear and carry all the time.

I've already sent out an email to my local maker community, via the HacDC and Dorkbot DC e-lists, and to the internal Maker Media list. But I thought it'd be fun to ask you all the question, have you email me your answers (and links to pictures!). I'll assemble it all into a column to run next week. I'll choose my favorite submission and send them a Maker's Notebook.

So, send me an email and tell me what you wear and carry that you'd consider part of your "tool set"? Send me links to pictures of your gear or links to products you use.

October 12, 2009

Linear actuators without shafting

A major obstacle standing in the way of total self-replication by rapid prototyping machines, notably RepRap, is that certain of the components, particularly ground shafting (or threaded rod) for the Cartesian robot's linear actuators, require greater precision than the machines are currently capable of. Thingiverse user fdavies is engaged in a noble effort to design printable linear actuators that require no shafting and are instead based on the hinged Sarrus linkage (Wikipedia). Excelsior!

October 8, 2009

Tool smackdown: Pocket multimeters

Mm-Rs-Aa-1
Nice round up from Mikey @ Popular Science. He writes...

On any given day you can find a miniature multimeter in my pocket. These devices are the equivalent of a Leatherman for electronic enthusiasts. (The Leatherman would be in my other pocket.) Most of the time, I want to check the voltage of a deep-cycle battery in my electric-vehicle or troubleshoot a problem with a solar photovoltaic system. But multimeters do things like current measuring, resistance and continuity, which make them handy for solving problems ranging from home wiring to electronics repair. (For more on what do do with one, check out Ladyada's multimeter tutorial on adafruit.com). I've used a number of "portable" units over the years, and while many are anything but, one jumps out as my solid favorite. Here's my take on a few popular units.

Box stitch for large-gauge cable bundling

This week's Lost Knowledge column on cable lacing has generated a lot of great discussion, in the comments to the piece, and on Boing Boing. There's a dearth of info on the subject online, and almost no video on it. We'd LOVE it if someone who knows how to do it could do a how-to, post it to YouTube, and send us the link. Here's one of the few video resources, a telco tech showing how to do a box stitch for bundling large gauge cables.

More:
Lost Knowledge: Cable lacing

October 7, 2009

Lost Knowledge: Cable lacing

The twice-monthly Lost Knowledge column explores the possible technology of the future in the forgotten ideas of the past (and those just slightly off to the side). Every other Wednesday, we look at retro-tech, "lost" technology, and the make-do, improvised "street tech" of village artisans and tradespeople from around the globe. "Lost Knowledge" was also the theme of MAKE, Volume 17

One of the cool things about doing this column is discovering lost technologies myself, things I knew nothing about before bumping into them while poking about the virtual attics and basements of cyberspace, looking for things to write about. For instance, I knew nothing about stick chart navigation before covering it here. And I'd certainly seen timbrel vaulting before, but didn't know that's what it was called, or how it worked.

We got such a great response to my last column on wire-wrapping (which was awhile ago, thanks to a most unwelcomed medical absence). There were site comments, emails, tweets, and Flickr photo pointers of people fondly, or not so fondly, remembering this disappearing art of circuit assembly. Several people mentioned cable lacing and that I should do a column on that next. I had no idea what cable lacing was, but one of the commenters pointed me to the Wikipedia page and another to Impulselabs' amazing photos on Flickr. Impulselabs describes the practice very succinctly:

The bundling is done with a technique called "cable lacing". A series of knots and stitches from a continuous piece of wax impregnated cotton or twine are used to bundle cables together. It takes some practice, but it'll outperform zipties in that it won't crush the insulative jackets on wiring and that it's not going to shift axially on you if it's loose. Likewise, my bundles have a rectangular cross section. Zipties can't conform and keep bundle shapes other than ellipses.

Cable lacing was cable management technique before zipties, used in the telecom industry, aerospace, marine applications, and elsewhere. The thin cord used is traditionally a waxed linen. Modern materials used today in flat "lacing tape" include nylon, polyester, and Nomex. There are different methods of lacing, such as the common marline hitch, seen here:

Here's an illustration from an old ARRL Amateur Radio Handbook, showing the marline hitch:

This one is another common lacing method, the "NASA-style" spot tie. Not nearly as elegant as a marline, but I guess it gets the job done:

Here's a page from "Workmanship and Design Practices for Electronic Equipment," showing different lacing and tying methods.

And here's a how-to on the Historic Naval Ships Association website.

There's not much more out there on the practice. If you do a search, you will find some images on various discussion boards of computer modders and others trying their hand at cable lacing the wiring inside of their computers and between the gear of their home media centers. It's nice to see that at least some folks are keeping the art alive.

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