atoms&electrons;

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.

Electronics Flea Market

I’ve lived in Silicon Valley for over a decade but until this weekend have never attended the monthly Electronics Flea Market at De Anza College in Cupertino. The fact that it’s on a Saturday and starts at 5AM may have had something to do with it. But this Saturday I set my alarm and was on the road by 6:30 headed south on 280.

I rolled into the parking lot around 7AM and the place was packed. At first I felt a bit out of place — lots of the cars had big HAM antennas on them and most of the folks were walking around with badges indicating their callsigns. I found myself gravitating towards the booths selling nicely packaged goods. There were plenty of guys who looked like they just opened up their trunk and dumped all their electronic trash into the parking lot, but walking up to such a stall was a commitment. I wasn’t actually looking for anything, so picking through junk and discussing Morse code or sidebands or whatever with some wild-eyed graybeard was a bit much at this hour of the day.