IDLE HANDS

a selfmade circuit a boss rc-2 and a korg monotron was seriously harmed today when I decided to make this little tune:

P.S. more information about the mystery circuit later 🙂

In the wait for my CNC-parts to show up, I tried my make a lot of holes approach to make a screen-print stencil.

First of a picture of the paper that I printed the motif on and later used as a guide for the drilling of the holes in a plastic oh paper.

Paper with the holes drilled

This is just an image of the plastic put down on the t-shirt, the red is from a print I did with this on a black t-shirt just before. But the red paint was old.

Putting down the helper frame, as you can se there are the remains from a few old prints me and or my wife made over the years.

Black paint added.

Using a rakel to smooch out the paint so that it presses through the holes

End result:

The conclusion is that the drill holes will probably work better if i drill them on a harder material, but that was just to painful to do with a small hand-held dremel. I could probably sand down the part’s of the holes that are more punchout’s then holes.

Anyway’s I’m gonna be sporting this here t-shirt later on when I’m with a few friends at Norbergfestival next weekend. I’ll see if I can find myself some motthapeggas there!

Me and Petter have been preparing for a gig at Norbergfestival’s openstage, we have this sofar:

A few small additions to the live-rig, say like a circuit-bent delay pedal behind the drums and we’re golden!

yeah, I’ve been reading up on CNC-machines. Obsessed even. The way you can be before a big build.

So what are my findings?
There are a few (what it appears) good looking small mills, if you want to CNC PBS’s and the such. They are not big enough for what I want though.

what it came down to in the end was the CNC Toolworks 12″ machine and the Probotix v90, they are similar in price and they seem to have the same amount of good reviews.

They cost about the same although I could not get price for freight from amazon. I hope it’s not the same flat rate as they use on everything else, because that is expensive 🙂

Finally I’ve decided for the Probotix V90, and then came all the rest of the questions. How do hook it up to a computer, what computer, what os, what programs would you use to make stuff with it, can you add lasers to it etc etc.

More reading and testing, seems like there are 2 players when it comes to controlling your CNC, either it’s a free Linux program or a crippled windows program. I’d like to run on os x, but that was not an option.
So I virtualized and started both of them (not at the same time) and both of them where ugly and looked unintuitive.

Also neither can run from anything but a stationary PC (no laptop) what is this, the dark ages?

Fear not, I’ve come to a solution, I will buy the V90 from Probotix, but none of the (use your printer port stuff) and the motors and arduino-motor shields from the maker-bot store.

The makerbot has even a g-code (language to control the machine) interpreter.

I will have to make some programming, it wont be much cheaper. I will probably not be able to use the available windows programs, but I don’t care, not really.

So soon, I will order stuff for a 1000 dollars

$204.00 + freight + toll from makerbot store.
$659.94 + freight + toll from probotix (for the v90)

thats $863.94

I’m just gonna leave this video here for you to look at.

The vibrator really was a nice addition!

Dear blog,

I know I’m supposed to write in you every-day, but I just wont.

However, today after getting the kids at my parents place where they spent the night, because me and the wife had our five year anniversary yesterday. That’s right, five years since we got married. Wood-wedding if you google it. No jokes allowed! ok. She made this awesome painting for me:

I took the image with my macintosh, becuase it’s hot and I’m lazy.

Anyways, dear diary blog after we got the kids we went to Billeberga, where they had a village garage sale. I really didnt find anything that I was into until we spotted two lasers, the kind you have to Disco’s. 50 SEK a piece they where, and we got a third one for free to get spare parts from. The guy who sold them got superexcited when I told him that I bought a fog-machine at Thomann. AT THEIR STORE. in Germany. Yeah, remember when I told you me and golden rocket pony took a care to Hildesheim? Anyways, the wife was so into going to yardsales she wanted to go to one more. I mean, we went and saw a movie yesterday (Prince of Persia) and ate some food, but I did not make her a painting. So we went from Billeberga to Eslöv and stopped at Gårdstånga to get some food. I had a french hot dog with french mustard. Then we went to Harlösa and went to another loppis. They had a jump-castle so the kids where a little satisfied. I bought a BMX for 50 sek. (thats about 5 dollars). I’m going to be kick-ass on the BMX’er. Then we went to Vombsjön and took a swim, It is the coldest sea in the whole wide world, it might say so on the wikipedia link after I’ve edited the page. Then we went to Löberöd and ate at the Tha-wagon it’s one of the best thai-resturaunts I’ve ever been to, and the reason we went by Löberöd. Then we had some soft-ice at the Café in Löberöd. I’m not really sure if you’re allowed to call yourself a café if you dont serve coffe, but what the hell, it’s the country. Then we went home. Hooray, I made some lattes and put about 50 tomato plants into the ground. My mom had some left that they couldent sell as small plants, So I just planted them and hope that they will survive to get some tomatoes/tomatos on them.

If you’re wondering about this blog post, fear not, the heat is making my brain simmer and my fingers type what I think. Yes, I  think that slow right now! oh what the hell, a few more exclamation marks before I push publish!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thats it.

I give you all a little bit of trams, it did not work so good though, but still.

I’m on vacation.

It’s nice.

I’m sitting in the shade, typing on my laptop, listening to the songs entering the jazzhole compo, watching the kids playing with (not in,as much) the pool.

It might have been a bad decision putting it next to the swings.

I’ve just bought a lot of clear plastic boxes so I can organize my workroom a bit better, and finish that sound-wall.

But now it’s so nice out, I’ll just sit here enjoying life.

Two or three years ago when I  just made my moanonme device and it got loads of attention I recieved a strange email with the title “LED project for you?”. This was a guy from Australia living in England that wanted to do some lead stuff for his band. Se his band was just 2 persons (Bass and Guitar) and a drum machine. And he wanted to make the drums to be a larger part of their stage presence by blinking with VU-meters.

Since Aaron turned out to be really nice in his emails and I really did not have to do more then think of solutions to his problem I was helped out as good as I could. We threw a few ideas back and forth, and I think it was mine that he finally made.

Often when you do this kind of thing, nothing happens afterward. I’ve helped people with “personal art projects”, coding, electronics, input on music, etc etc. Often this does not amount to anything. Nothing is produced and there is nothing to show. This is ok, not every project succeds. Failing and or abandoning them is also ok.

I emailed Aaron once half a year after he told me he was finished asking for a video or image, he didn’t have one (yet), and I forgot all about it until the Sunday before last when he sent me an email. It had the same title, so he obviously replied to our old thread, I had to dig into memory (and look into the old discussion in the email) to remember what it was all about. The first sentences of the email was Aaron telling me that he hadn’t have had the time to film the device yet.

BUT they where going to play in Malmö Tuesday night and if I lived there he would put me on the guest list and I could check it out for myself. I work in Malmö, so I told him that I would be there. Tuesday came along and I went to see Civil Civic and the device I helped engineer. It was awesome. The music was great, chatting with Aaron afterward was also great.

Best of all was the feeling I had, sometimes helping ppl on the internet pays of, and when it does it’s a great feeling.

So go check out Civil Civic if you have a chance, at least on the internets, maybe there will be a video of the device sometimes. I took some pictures, but I like the elusive feel of it not being documented or put on the net.

So here is my simple little processing sketch that made all the nice circles.

Here is the source and example in a nice zipfile: LazerDirector

And here is the source, copy pasted, nice!

/* Lazor Director is a processing.org sketch to make halftone images into svg files that can be sent to a laser-cutter service,
examples of these are

http://www.cutyourway.com/
http://ponoko.com/
and
http://www.1scale1.com/

Please note that the processing image is not a real representation of how the svg looks, the svg has far better resolution

*/

PrintWriter output; // We use this to pritnt the svg file

PImage photo; //the original image that we want to convert to halftoneish svg

void setup()
{
  smooth(); //we want the smoothest possible edges in the image we see, can be removed for speed

  photo = loadImage("lobo.png"); //input image, that is, here is where you load what you want to halftone-hole (make sure it has the same size as the svg file output(se further down)) 
  size((int)(photo.width), (int)(photo.height));  //change processings window output widht and height

  output = createWriter("output.svg"); 

  background(0);  //setting the background to black, this is because I have black pastic to cut out from, add here your materials color

/*this is the header of the svg file. , 1080*1080 is 12"*12" (according to inkscape) */
  output.println("");
  output.println(""); //1080 * 1080 is 12"x12"

  output.println(" Test");
  output.println("");
  output.println(" Layer 1");

  drawCircles2(photo, 12); //the function that does the finding of the circles, second parameter is how large chunks (in pixels)it shall search in.
  output.println("");
  output.println("");
  save("output.png");
  output.flush();
  output.close();  

}  

void draw()
{
//nothing to do here
}  

void drawCircles2(PImage photo, int spacing)
{
  for(int j = 0; j < photo.height; j+=spacing) //looping through the image, in squares of 
  {
    for(int i = 0; i < photo.width; i+=spacing)
    {
      PImage segment = photo.get(i, j, spacing, spacing); //cuting out a whole
      float brighnezz = getAreaBrightness(segment); //meassuring the brighness
      float cSize =( brighnezz/51.2); //adjusting the size of the whole depending on the brightnezz

      if(cSize >1.5) //to small holes, we dont care about (was 0.5 in the one I show over at:
      {
        fill(255); //white here because I want to get a feel for how it would look if added light behind
        stroke(255); //same here
        /*writing the svg information to file */
        output.println(" +cSize+"\" cy=\""+j+"\" cx=\""+i+"\"/> ");
        /* drawing preview on screen */
        ellipse(i, j,cSize, cSize);
      }
    }
  }
}   

int getAreaBrightness(PImage area)
{
  int bval = 0, count = 1;

  for(int i = 0; i < area.width; i++)
  {
    for(int j = 0; j < area.height; j++)
    {
      color check = area.get(i, j); 

      bval += brightness(check); //thank you processign for having all the dedious task's as functions!
      count++;
    }
  }
  return (int)(bval/count);
}