Kwartzlab Society Inc.

 
Got my toolchain sorted out by switching to WinAVR with AVR Studio 4. Simple code, blinking out Vegas-style.
 
Happy making,
DW

 
Sweet progress on the circuit board mill at TON this week. I swapped in a pure Win98 laptop (booted to DOS) for the Win ME laptop I tried last week. Using pure DOS mode (vs a DOS box) allowed TurboCNC to run smoothly, no interference with either the laptop timer chip or parallel port access. Motors have that old smooth sound, no dropped steps, rock solid consistency of tool path. I hope to be cutting copper later this week.
 

More after the break...
 

 
I pulled the CNC circuit board mill that I designed and built out of my basement lab and brought it to kwartzlab. I'm working with Karl on the CNC-DIY-FUN theme. This is a 3-axis vertical mill that I built with just a drill press and a hacksaw. The design goals were low-cost and accuracy down to 0.001" to allow milling of circuit boards. While the mechanics of this mill were worked out a while back, it does need better driver electronics and some tramming. Karl, Ben, and I are putting together a kwartzlab toolchain for doing CNC milling (which would also support the eventual laser cutter). The idea is that we will all use the same tools in order to share knowledge/scripts/code/designs and get something together that just works. The components will be:

1. CAD or vector-graphics based program for design
2. CAM to convert design files to a tool path for cutting
3. Mill driver software to interpret the CAM-generated gcode and drive the mill's cutting head

We're building our own tools to support our vision of rapid prototyping, where we can go into the lab with an idea and have a working prototype in our hands within hours instead of weeks or months. That's the goal. If you'd like to donate tools or materials, please contact me.
 

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Some success with decoding the IR signals in real time!

 
Find out tonight at 5+5. 7pm at the lab.
 
Happy making,
DW

 
Tonight I pulled the trigger and went into mass production, glazing 30 eyeballs with epoxy. My side experiment with the acrylic alternative concluded. I resolved the orange peel effect in the acrylic finish by covering the wet piece with a bucket. So it was likely either dust or too-fast drying that caused that. Nevertheless, to get the same depth of shine as the epoxy I had to apply three coats of acrylic. So epoxy wins for this gig.
 

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Ran some experiments glazing the eyeballs to get that shiny wet look. Tried a massively toxic 2-part epoxy and a mildly delightful air-dry acrylic. As luck (and perhaps chemistry) would have it, their ease of application was inversely related to their performance as a glaze.
 
Question for the artists out there: what would cause an acrylic glaze to orange peel on me?
 
More after the break...
 

 
So the strawlenoid mounting cradle that my VBF cut for me on the laser is going to work out perfectly. I sort of winged it and had him cut a whack of them without testing a prototype for fit. It's all good. This cradle will hold the strawlenoid in place on the back of the eye panels. Much more robust connection that just taping them on as I've previously done. I found in run-down tests that the strawlenoids eventually wiggle free from the tape, so this is a response to that observation.
 

 
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Snuck in a couple of hours on the laser tonight thanks to my Very Best Friend (VBF). Each sheet(!) of irises was cut in only 3:08. That is way faster throughput than my manual cuts. I think this project is a good illustration of how rapid prototyping can make possible the previously impossible, in particular with respect to scale for this piece.
 
More after the break...
 

Part 1