atoms&electrons;

I’m obsessed with LEDs. If I go to Halted to pick up 30 cents worth of capacitors, I will leave with 10 bucks worth of LEDs. When I first started learning about Arduino a few months back, most of my project ideas centered around LEDs. I imagined building my own Daft Punk helmet or a video wall made of LEDs.

That’s the best part of getting a new hobby – those first few weeks when everything is pure possibility and you have no idea how hard anything is. Maybe you recently decided to get into shape and have started exercising, so you read about Tabata Intervals or 20-rep squats and say to yourself “That sounds fun!” Naiveté like this tends not to last very long – doing anything that’s truly impressive requires hard work and this applies to LEDs just the same as it applies to squats.

I was at a local toy store recently and saw a display of Etch A Sketch toys. They were marketed as “retro” toys – something you would buy to remind you of a bygone era and feel thankful for having the great fortune to live in a more sophisticated period of history. I had an Etch A Sketch when I was a kid and I can assure you that when I played with it I did so without any cool ironic detachment. For me, that thing was bad-ass.

Keep in mind, this was before video games. I realize they’re putting Nintendo NES systems on key chains and giving them away in cereal boxes these days, but even NES was way beyond the first video games that came after my Etch A Sketch days. Atari 2600, Fairchild Channel-F, even Pong had yet to appear. But Etch A Sketch did exist and it’s true full name is the Etch A Sketch Magic Screen. It’s easy to overlook, but it’s designed to look like a TV. TVs used to have knobs on them – one for channel and the other for volume – just like the Etch A Sketch. So basically it was a TV that I could control and put any image I could imagine onto.

I should probably start by saying I’m not an expert in Buddhist practices or those of just about any other religion. The sum total of my knowledge in this area was picked up from Chinese restaurants, re-runs of Kung Fu and the occasional PBS documentary. Somehow amidst the Honey Walnut Prawns and pledge drives I’ve become aware of an exercise practiced by Buddhist monks that I find fascinating.

Tibetan Sand Painting is an ancient art where monks creating beautiful and exquisitely detailed pieces of artwork with colored sand. It’s a labor-intensive process that can take days to complete, and the results are amazing. But when the art is completed they simply brush the sand away destroying the image. It’s a metaphor for the fleeting nature of life. That’s always seemed intriguing to me – creating something just to destroy it. Now I’m not sure if this next part is true or not, but I recall hearing that they destroy the artwork the instant it is completed. There’s no sitting around gazing upon their work in awe and high-fiving each other. The point of the creation is the destruction and nothing else. So the logical thing to do upon its completion is to immediately trash it. It’s religious meditation as punk rock. Maybe that’s why this idea is appealing to me.

Following up on my flea market score earlier in the weekend I decided to assemble my treasures into something useful…or at least just into something period. By the end of Sunday night I was the proud owner of a 1-axis CNC plotter. It completely automates the process of drawing straight lines along a fixed axis :).

The eventual goal is to build a plotter/CNC that is actually useful, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

One of my favorite toys at Techshop is the Epilog laser cutter. It can cut and etch at resolutions up to 1200dpi. It can cut through things like paper, cardboard, acrylic and thin wood as well as etching into those materials, metal and even food.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with creating pictures by cutting pieces out of colored card stock and stacking them up. The way to think about it is that each layer of paper gives you a single color – it’s like a 1-bit monochrome bitmap that’s either the color of the paper or transparent showing what’s behind it. Newspaper printers figured out ages ago how to deal with a similar set of constraints – a single ink color, but high resolution of ink placement – and approximate multiple shades of color using a technique called half-toning. Here’s how I adapted this technique for paper-cut images.