I think I'm done with the work table CAD. I still need to make drawings for each piece that I'm going to fabricate. I'd also like to laser-cut some hole marking jigs to facilitate my layout and build. Added in the casters and bumpers and hid the tabletop to show the leg truss assemblies. I won't have a chance to get in the shop until middle of next week, so this might have to shift to the back burner for a few days.
Work table CAD progress++
Low energy day. Made some progress on the work table design. Realized that my current assembly/disassembly plan involved only securing ~0.25" of the tabletop to the support trusses. I'm going to revisit this part of the layout with fresh eyes tomorrow.
More progress.
Got back to my CAD roots and fired up SketchUp today. I'm definitely missing my parametric workflow from Solidworks, but it feels good to design within my existing constraints. Did some development on the work table design. I'm hoping to finish the CAD and layout by the end of tomorrow.
Work table CAD in progress.
I'm designing and building a work bench as my next project. My hope is that creating a dedicated build area will lower my activation energy for projects in the future. It's likely that I'm moving in the nearish future, so I'm planning to make a sturdy work table that I can still disassemble enough to easily move it when the time comes. I spent today lining up a lot of the random hardware and doing a couple of sketches. More detailed design is tomorrow's project.
Sketching out the work table.
Spent the day with Kevin, a good friend of mine. We monkeyed around a little bit with my Spark Core and some other components. A while back, I got the parts for building out some stairway illumination, but I never did anything with it. It was great to get these parts out of the box and start messing around. First test was getting the analog output of force-sensitive flexible resistor to trigger an LED - success!
Spark core + LED.
Late night rambling on a big piece of paper. Started by tracing the outline of a scrap piece of CNC routed wood I found in the bin at TechShop.
1:06 AM
Done with the pot rack! It's only nine months late. I've done worse. Installed that and a spatula rack today. The pot rack feels pretty rugged (mounted to wall studs). The spatula rack does not feel very rugged (mounted to drywall anchors). Let's see how they hold up!
In other news, it looks like I will be starting my next job a week later than I had originally planned. All the more time for projects!
The long overdue pot rack.
And the impulsively made spatula rack!
After stalling out with pen and paper, I turned to Illustrator to help me flesh out the glimmers of a new light sculpture idea that has been kicking around in my head. I think I'll need to move to quick 3D prototypes soon, but this was helpful for the moment.
Exploratory triangles.
Got back in the shop for the first time in a while. Nothing's done just yet, so I'm only including a photo of my build sketch. Currently working on a pot rack and a spatula/kitchen doodad mini rack for our kitchen. It's been a chunk of time since I last mashed in a wood shop, and I definitely felt like I was in slow motion during my session today. Felt good to shake some of the rust off. Restorative stuff.
Kitchen racks build sketch.
Today's constraint was yesterday's and tomorrow's tool. The entirety of 8/28 was conceived upon, designed for, and executed with my iPhone 5S. There are amazing emergent phenomena to uncover in our everyday objects and devices. I took a self portrait on my phone and degraded it by sequentially compound filtering it with all color-enabled iOS photo filters. I also made a looped animation of the 13-step cycle.
Inspired by Purin's brilliant exploration into digital/physical recursive degeneration (early 2010).
narcissist // degenerate
Animated cycle.
I recently pulled an old roll of film out of my F3 to get it processed. I didn't know when I had first loaded it up, so I had no idea what was on it. The roll had a handful of shots from the tail end of my summer in Boston (2012), but the majority of it was blurry rapid shots from this New Year's Eve (2013/2014). I had been trying to waste the roll so I could load a fresh one, but I guess I stopped after... wasting the roll.
For today's project, I decided to wander a little bit. I opened up one of the most haphazard pictures from the roll and started re-sampling and patterning it. With Daniel Avery's most excellent Essential Mix as my soundtrack, it got a little weird. I've included the starting picture as well as the end result.
The original scanned image...
...and what came of it.
Must not take a day off! Cranked out a late-night second foray into fonts. My new constraint was to use the same set of building blocks for each letter: 2 identical arcs (180°, 150 px by 75 px) and 1 line segment (150 px). I tried to show all three components in each letter, even if the letter could be constructed with only one (or two) of these parts.
3-line ABCs.
Getting knocked back a couple steps by an incoming cold. No luck getting the Processing sketch up today. For today, I worked on the first few letters of a simple font. I'm laying out the font with the constraint that it only be built of added and subtracted squares and circles. My inspiration for this prompt is the great series of minimal movie posters designed by my friend Jimmy Chion. In his series, Jimmy distilled movie posters to geometric representations using only one square and one circle. They're rad.
Not sure if I'll come back to work more on this font or not, but it was a fun way to use constraints as accelerants.
Squares + circles = ABCs.
I hoped that today's Thing would focus on resolving the problems I had embedding yesterday's Processing sketch into the site. Threw a bunch of hours at this... and came up unsuccessful again. Pretty frustrated that I can't get this to work, especially because I'm confident that my task is the web equivalent of hot gluing two pieces of foam core together. The good news is that I'm getting inspired to learn more about web design, and unlike before, I actually have some time to invest in this pursuit. We'll see what happens.
Until then... today's thing is Cookies. I made a boatload of M&M cookies, and they're delicious. I also drew a sketch of a rocketship going to Mars.
Next stop, Mars.
Cookies.
I really dig Processing. Most of the coding I poke around with is centered on interactive and visual explorations, and Processing really helps close the gap between idea and prototype. I spent a bit of the afternoon putting together a little bouncy-ball application. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to embed the interactive application itself into the site, but then I realized this task was its own creative project for another day. For now, here's a video of the application.
Pellet Drop (Video)