work bird updates

Found an old project in a box and it still works! The wires got a bit crumpled but all sixteen LEDs still glow.

important 3d prints today

this weekend was a Sludge Tile Production Weekend

new work mac feat. diverse LED chemistries for various green indicators (shout-out zachfred.in/projects/bli... for avoiding clashes!)

if you're feeling generous a donation of 10$ or more to OSHWA will get you one of these beautiful Move Slow and Fix Stuff riso printed posters designed by @leeborg.bsky.social ! Donate here: secure.lglforms.com/form_engine/...

:_(

A friend snuck into the workshop 🥹

waterjet sludge composite experiments continue, basement-kiln-edition!!

Low aspect ratio groundhog eating kousa dogwood berries

thermal hummingbirdo

a found crab claw, via micro-ct

maybe a loon chick soon?!?

these woodpeckers are getting out of control (laptop for scale)

a flicker friend I met today

SLUDGE CRAFT we helped Josh fab up a fork crenellation tool out of sintered waterjet waste / scrap barrel clay slop composite

I rescued a friend from the haystack fablab 😭

I swung by my old lab to help the new shop manager re-awaken my favorite tool from grad school, and was reminded of how much I looooooove wire-EDMing things

Kids find things.

today's 3d print is particularly chompy

Lynn Woods Reservation partially burned last fall. Or so I learned this past weekend! I hadn't walked through a recently burned area like this previously. Lots of charred stumps and young plants.

www.dailytable.org/store-closing This is so very sad. The Daily Table provides low cost healthy food to many across the Boston area. It's a great grocery store and will be deeply missed.

I wrote a book and it's out today. This is not a drill. Get the book critics are calling "captivating, charged and crucially provocative": SECOND LIFE: HAVING A CHILD IN THE DIGITAL AGE bookshop.org/p/books/seco...

PLAttice! A new thing I've been working on: fully 3D printed and reversibly assembled lattices for building person-scale trusses. The light stand is squeezed between the floor and ceiling, and features a lovely cyanotype lampshade made by Sri Thumati. More info and files: zachfred.in/projects/pla...

some good birds today!! What a delicious rock

@hackadayofficial.bsky.social posted my superconf talk from November! So uh, give it a watch if you want to see me get so excited talking about a project that I run out of breath 🫠 youtu.be/aGVqcYA3kkA

I assembled a matboard lattice into a hyperbolic surface (truncated order-7 triangular tiling, or a "hyperbolic soccer ball") in my kitchen and it perhaps unsurprisingly takes up an absurd amount of space.

thank you algorithms this is what I needed to see today youtu.be/saRir95iIWk?...

finally spending enough time with grasshopper that a few tidbits are sticking around! also don't be shy about asking your framer for matboard scraps, it's a fabulous free learning substrate. 🦏🦗

noticed evidence of good waddling

A poofed hairy woodpecker from a recent visit to Acadia

Back at at supercon '22, @zachfredin.bsky.social and I get things working moments before the badge hacking contest deadline. We made an optical “punchcard” reader to load programs into the 4-bit computer badge using scavenged LEDs as sensors.

mmm early self-purchased presents 😎

I hand-built a tiny 4x8 (minus one that fell off) brick screen out of the first bunch of jumper arrays off the reel. I worked flat on a blank bit of perfboard before soldering it up on an edge. This sorta worked but took a ~minute per 'brick' with some suspect joints, so I'm going to try paste next.

I finally bought a _full reel_ of tiny 0804 resistor network jumpers to do, uh, art projects, and decided to fab up a handful of 30x wood mockups while I wait for them to arrive (and build some little assembly tools and such).

a Useful Nugget for building lead screw machines with less backlash: 3D-printed anti-backlash flexures which push a pair of cheap brass lead screw nuts apart. You can tune the stiffness by adjusting the flexure dimensions, and they're easy to snug up during assembly. Loctite isn't a bad idea either.

first speed rhino from circuit graver tests earlier this fall. good stepper motor noises!

weekend projects are just excuses to thread machine screws directly into plywood

I did a zach milling project last week too: added a lil lake inlay to the top of my water bottle. I laser cut the ply to nominal dimensions so there is a bit of kerf gap, but the char outline looks good so we'll call that intentional. After gluing I sanded flat and hit it with a bit of wipe-on poly.

I spent thanksgiving with my cousins and made them a set of friendly stamping blocks out of end grain maple. Maybe for food stamping?! Custom marked cookies or labeled pie crust? The chamfered edge will hopefully keep them from chipping too much. Also don't forget to reset your zeros hahaha oops 😬

holiday weekend projects woooooooo! I haven't played with odrives since the 3.x days, this lil friend is a treat!

picked up a strange and interesting defect on the SLS printer the other day. I think the part must have shifted during the print, so the layers didn't fully sinter together. All of the other parts from the batch are great! Maybe this is common? First time for me. delicious nylon baklava mmmmm

I ebay'd a nice test indicator and used it to sweep in a set of (also ebay'd) mgn5 linear guides; probably a fractional hair short of hiwin's 2 micron parallelism spec, but it's all 3d printed anyway with pretty small loads so 🤷

circuit graver test jig making tiny chips-chips-chips over the summer, with a qfn attiny88 for scale. this was an important test, and paved the way for the full machine build sprint!

zund-ing some bostony patches for a sports-enjoying colleague

a fun laser cutter project! we all need fun projects nowadays. a few months ago I spent time at Haystack and built a nifty iteration of taper pin joints that takes advantage of laser cutter taper. no other materials needed to make weird structures from thin plywood. more: zachfred.in/projects/fli...

a shot of the circuit graver at the Supercon8 soldering table in the alley behind LACM. when not giving or attending talks, I spent a good deal of time carving PCBs for attendees, it was great fun!

more carved circuit pictures! most of this was designed in kicad after placing footprints; the curved bits are inkscape updates. red dots on the drawing are nets which had shorts to adjacent pads and needed a quick fix with a razor. note torn areas at resistor networks; crossing tracks is hard!

the carved circuit in action! nothing particularly exotic: a pair of tiny DFN-pkg shift registers driving a bunch of green 0402 LEDs as binary counters via miniscule resistor networks. the home fab method is very much 1-layer with no vias, so bodge wires are needed here and there to jump traces.