I made this hyperboloid years ago when LED strings were only available with 10 cm spacing. The old LED string broke, so I restrung it with higher density pixels, and am playing with 3D patterns on the #pixelblaze controller.

I am an orchid show taking a tour. The speaker, a lovely older lady, explained that growers are very generous in sharing cuttings freely and that their generosity "puts the 'whore' in 'horticulture!'" 😂

I recently returned from an incredible trip to Antarctica and I need everyone to look at my penguin photos.

Ended up needing a new sewing machine, but now that it's arrived, I've been able to finish sewing the Ouija messenger bag. The project has entered the hot-glue phase. Only a few LEDs left to go.

In my house it's the festival of LEDs

Thanksgiving prep smells very good right now

A terrible Hitchcock remake appears to be taking place on the UCLA campus this morning.

Ooooh, my LED strip lamp is assembled and works great! It produces a nice diffuse arc of light around a work area, and is flexible and movable and dimmable 😁

Love to see the creativity at display with all the customized @hackadayofficial.bsky.social Supercon badges! Photo by Jeremy Geppert

The wait is finally over, we're happy to announce that the KeebDeck Keyboard and our first product using it, the KeebDeck Basic, are now available for sale from our @lectronz.com store! ⌨️ lectronz.com/stores/solde...

I wore my Owl head and cyberpunk jacket for the Halloween party at #supercon and a bit Saturday night too. Though I had to keep taking it off to speak to people. At some point I need to add a speaker like those used for some storm trooper helmets.

There were a number of cool badge cases at Supercon this year. @thzinc kinda vaporwave case was really cool in person. Also here's @geekmomprojects 's Souis Cuitton purse and ageppert's Speak&Spell

Four ways (of many) recursively subdividing/tessellating a pentagon (made with https://thi.ng/geom-tessellate)... #tilingtuesday #geometry #subdivision #thingumbrella

I got my SAO boards in for #SuperCon, and, since I didn't leave enough time for revisions, a bodge wire is required. I'm just relieved it's fixable. Since SuperCon starts on Halloween this year, the "SAOuija" is nicely thematic. Still working on the code. I'd […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

In Santa Monica for the #nokings March. My sign was last minute but the hat and shirt have gotten a lot of use.

Made a 🌈 on the new #raspberrypi 500+, and l'm not sure I'll ever get past playing with the keyboard to use it for another purpose!

Just set up a small wearables exhibit for this weekend's #bayareamakerfaire. I'll be giving workshops today and a talk tomorrow as well, so it's going to be a (fun) busy weekend!

don't follow sports, but have somehow ended up at a football game today (Broncos @Chargers), and feel like it's mostly just an excuse for day drinking.

At the Orange County Maker Faire this weekend, I got to see @californiasteam and his gorgeous LED jewelry creations, and was super excited to get one of his brand new "Duonacci" pendants. It's powered by a super capacitor which charges fully in just minutes and lasts for many hours.

Getting ready to bring some Bendy SAO boards to @crashspaceLA tonight for a presentation with @alpenglow where well show off some fun PCB projects. Attached the SAOs to the SuperCon 2024 badge and it's giving strong Medusa vibes!

Maker Tom Keddie remixed the Bendy SAO board for a Pride event, and love how it turned out! https://hackaday.io/project/203708-bendysao-went-to-pride

Riley (left) channeling his spirit animal on the UCLA campus

Experimenting with making an illuminated daisy chain by 3D printing snap-on circular covers for a pebble light string and cutting shiny vinyl flowers that fit around the glowy centers.

I'm belatedly getting around to showing off this **GORGEOUS** crochet hat the uber talented @alpenglow made for me. She integrated a pebble light string and #pixelblaze controller. It's all powered by a flat top 18650 with a clever charge/discharge circuit […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

I'm teaching at a nonprofit STEM education camp this week, and yesterday we had an activity where the kids had to solve science puzzles to figure out who had kidnapped our class mascot, a masking-tape goldfish. All staff members were suspects. One child made […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The prize for winning a top spot at the Hackaday SuperCon SAO challenge with my Bendy SAO design was getting 100 copies of it produced and assembled. These bendy boys just arrived this week. They're getting flashed and paired with 3D printed stands, so now I […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Walking in the UCLA campus today, I grabbed what I thought was a copy of the "Daily Bruin" student newspaper. Turns out it's a (quite good!) lookalike satire. Worth zooming in on the images to read the headlines.

There will come a day when I finish an entire sewing pattern without installing a piece backwards. Today is not that day.

Just finished sewing a new sling bag with a 32x18 LED matrix inside the pocket flap. The pocket flap snaps off so the matrix can be used in other designs. The #pixelblaze controller and battery fit nicely inside the front pocket

Was hiking when my dog emerged from the bushes with this large bone. I texted my (doctor) husband to see what it was and he texted it back "fibia," then immediately went offline before answering my second question, "not human, right?" Still waiting for that […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Is my weekly #teslatakedown protest. This Saturday I'm in Santa Monica. Smallish but quite high impact protest with good energy and a very high visibility location at the 3rd Street promenade. Also, this couple is awesome.

Another small but mighty protest outside the Milken conference in Beverly Hills where Musk is speaking #teslatakedown

This is fine...

It rained this morning, so the weekly Santa Barbara #teslatakedown protest is smaller than usual, but mighty in spirit.

The diffusers on the new LED polyhedron (dihedral hexacontahedron, right) looked so much better than the first build that I had to print new ones for the truncated icosahedron (left). I also synced up the patterns on both builds (with #pixelblaze) and will be […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Another Saturday, another #teslatakedown protest. This is a portion of the crowd outside the dealership in Santa Barbara.

The LED deltoidal hexacontahedron is complete! 60 identical PCB sides covered with 3D printed diffusers. Two #pixelblaze controllers work in sync to provide a fast frame rate for patterns on the 1200 LEDs.

Am enjoying having a Pixelfed account There are small differences between it and Mastodon that are taking some getting used to. Nothing too radical, nothing really better or worse, just little things like the layout. It took me a bit to get comfy here, but I did, so I expect these growing pains […]

New LED polyhedron build is underway. The video shows two halves of a dihedral hexacontahedron which will have 60 identical kite-shaped sides. This is the third PCB-based polyhedron build in a row, and each one is an improvement. These 3D printed tile covers […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Headed out to my weekly Tesla protest

It's been a fun morning. I'm helping a Los Angeles STEM education nonprofit prepare a kids' event, and I got to build and play with this vertical wind tube. (Remarkably simple instructions here: https://gooddayswithkids.com/2015/02/08/build-wind-tube/)

Finished V2 of the truncated icosahedron, and I'm very happy with how it turned out. The sides are 32 hexagonal and pentagonal PCBs, joined by 3D printed corner connectors and covered with 3D printed diffusers. The pixels are mapped and it's running 3D animation patterns on a #pixelblaze.

[US Politics] Went to a protest at SpaceX today. It felt good to join others in taking action.

Truncated Icosahedron project rev. 2 is in progress, and I'm much happier with this version. It's less (but still somewhat) fiddly to assemble and has 3x the LEDs!

Using p5.js to map the vertices of the truncated icosahedron build. I'm always too lazy to make 3D mapping part of a project's design phase and I always regret it later on!

On the plane home from Winter Light Festival and I looked down to see my water bottle doing this. Took me a second to realize it had accidentally toggled a random LED bauble that was in the same pocket 😂

Headed out to the Portland Winter Lights festival. I have adopted a "more is more" aesthetic for the evening.

This quote from Count Zero by the very prescient William Gibson (@GreatDismal) keeps popping into my head... "And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

I spent much of 2016 through 2020 in mental "fight or flight" mode, and I gotta say, that feeling sucks just as much now as I remember it did.

Quickly designed and printed tea light holders for a Lunar New Year celebration tonight. The transclucent portion is embossed with the Chinese character for luck. The embossing should be thicker to make the characters stand out more, but the pretty, color changing LED tea lights cover any flaws.