Kwartzlab Society Inc.

John Johnson was kind enough to let me get some video of his FPGA project.

Gus decided to sell his Taig CNC Milling machine so it now has a good home in my basement.
I put it use right away, cutting out four aluminum support mounts for the 1/2-inch slide rails for the Y-axis of the CNC router that I’m in the process of building. The X-axis and Z-axis of the machine were built using hand tools. Watching the parts materialize as the endmill cut the aluminum was very exciting! The finished parts were perfect.

Click through for lots more!

I dusted off my miniSoOnCon badge [1], and connected Jimmie Rodger’s Open Heart 2.0 [2] to it :)

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On February 23, Tom and Brian dropped by the lab to show us some of the amazing things they have built using their Taig desktop milling machines.
Tom showed us his fascinating Stirling engine . This machine runs on a heat source, in this case a mug of hot water. The cool thing about Toms engine is that it was all done with his Taig mill and lathe. The machine ran for hours sitting on top of the mug of hot water. Very nice precision work!

Click through for more…

As those who watch the mailing list know, I’ve been very excited about these printed circuit board motors.
Printed Circut board Motors

 
Gus, Eric, Karl, and I attended TEDxWaterloo on Thursday. Fantastic experience. Great crowd, great talks, great afterparty.
 
Here we are at The Gig theatre (the old Highland cinema), lining up to get in.
  

More after the break…
Spoiler: Amy Krouse Rosenthal was my fave.
  

Processing (http://processing.org) is a Java-based graphical programming language. Great for getting instant feedback and making pretty pictures.

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At yesterday’s Tuesday Open Night, we made this video.

It’s shot with a Canon FS200 on a 60” tripod. Clips were stitched together using Cyberlink PowerDirector 8.

It seems I’ve made some significant progress with the algorithm, just not enough yet.

After some discussion in the comments of my last entry, I decided that my next attempt should be to add a check after every move to make sure that I hadn’t boxed any positions in, making them unreachable.

So, after a talk on IRC with @flying_squirrel (Darcy), I decided to add a progress indicator to the program. This indicator would tell me what estimated percentage of the total number of permutations the program had exhausted and display this information in increments of 1%. As it turns out, this wasn’t very helpful. Let me explain: