atoms&electrons;

…think alike, or so the saying goes. The implication being that if someone thinks like you, you naturally assume their mind is great. I find the greatest minds are the ones that are roughly on the same axis as yours, but followed it and got to a different spot. I’ve found a few such folks on the web and these are the ones I watch to see what their great minds have come up with.

First Stop: DudeCraft

Back in July I built RoboSketch which to this day still gets more traffic than any other post on my blog. People seem to love it. Somehow the spammers have figured this out because it gets dozens of comments daily hawking Acai Berry diets, Colon Cleansing products and my favorite which is a site that sells the book “How To Get Pregnant.” But the dirty little secret is that aside from the demo video, I was never able to get the RoboSketch to draw anything without failing in one way or another.

We’re not sending anyone to the moon here, so failure is always an option. In fact, failure isn’t feared, it’s desired. The best way to learn is hands-on, doing things and making mistakes. When you make a mistake yourself, that knowledge is ingrained in you in a concrete tangible way and you’re better off for it. So when my Etch A Sketch device was having conniptions, I took note of the failure and followed the advice of that most wise sage Tim Gunn. Make it work, people.

Merry Christmas!

Sparkle Labs published a paper Christmas tree kit (http://kits.sparklelabs.com/2009/12/15/light-up-christmas-tree-project/) that I did on my Craft Robo paper cutter. I lit them up with a pair of ShiftBrite addressable RGB LEDs controlled by an Arduino microcontroller. It’s basically a slightly modified version of the Spookotron Halloween pumpkin lights.

This is the result of my first experiment making a sliceform object from interlocking pieces of cut cardstock. I got the idea and the name “sliceform” from a variety of folks on the web who are experimenting with this. Just as I was posting this I discovered these pictures on flickr from someone with the exact same colors of cardstock.

I tried out two new ideas for Halloween this year. One of them was an ill-conceived plan to carve a pumpkin using a Dremel tool. The pumpkin looked OK, but by the end I was covered in microscopic pumpkin shrapnel from head to toe. The other idea was to make an LED pumpkin light, and it turned out great.

I call it the Spookotron and it uses 3 ShiftBrite RGB LEDs to light up the inside of a pumpkin. The LEDs are controlled by an Atmel ATMega 8-bit microcontroller. I chose the Arduino-compatible RBBB from Modern Device because it’s tiny and easy to program.