hello, maker faire!

Come visit the 8 Bit Lit booth! (It’s in the expo hall, apparently next to Noisebridge.)

Also, come see my hologram+laser-enabled top hat! I’m showing it during the Wearable Computing Fashion Show; if EL wire counts, so does my hobby! I’ll have a blog post up about this thing later. The glue and solder cooled about three hours ago.

I’ve put up a new page, with doodles of people I come across at techie things. Gotta find the other set and put them up… I don’t actually remember what event it was, but I recall it being MARVELOUS. This does not narrow down my journal-search much. :/

Finally, if it’s your first time on these pages, welcome! I do like having visitors.

The Mission Dolores Park Unmanned Airplane Incident

Hey, want to see me almost get hit by a plane?

It’s okay. Of course you do.

Just check this out:

This onboard footage was distributed publicly via the Noisebridge Tumblr. The vast majority of the video is super boring stuff, like an expertly-guided unmanned flight over a crowded public area, hackerspace denizens visiting from Dresden (led by Sebastian of the Plane), frickin’ WIRELESS VIDEO GOGGLES, and a crash-landing into the lovely SF landscape (at about 4:30).

I seem to have great and terrible luck with UAVs, these days. I recently met Andreas, an Arducopter / DIY Drones enthusiast, at TechShop. He’s been tuning up his latest model, which features an ingenious leg/rotor armature. We ran an indoor test last week, while I was recovering from a nasty sickness and wouldn’t have been awake but for the Sudafed. We tied the arms down to a table while he tested the rotors.

I’m blaming the Sudafed for my decision to stick my hand in there; this spark of genius came just after Andreas’ lecture about how razor-sharp the 11-inch props are, and he did an excellent job of bandaging me up. The flap is reattaching.

Okay, it’s true.

I let Instagram do a lot of the color/cropping edits for this post. Skip this one if you’re “sensitive”.

I’ve had a lot of time, recently, to go to events. (More exciting stuff about that later.) This means that I’ve needed more business cards!

Despite fully believing the adage that “Perfect is the enemy of Good”, I can’t seem to settle for regular cards. I’ve made them out of piezos, in little tab shapes, and now, as little diamonds that I’ve (God help me) typed out by hand. On a typewriter. On both sides. This is possibly my most inefficient design yet, which I’m increasingly convinced is the hallmark of my art.

I fired up the Hermes 3000 I’m borrowing from my mom, and, by pounding on the spacebar, counted 76 columns I could work with. The neighbors then had a brief respite from the noise, while I used a monospace font (Courier, naturally) to work out a design on the computer.

To my neighbors’ misfortune, the worst sound pollution was still to come. After a few prototypes, I finally settled on 5 blank rows between blocks of text. For the last two rows of each card, I could judge alignment by the row above — but for the others, every character had to be entered by hand, so that I could count the spaces.

I cut this first set apart with a mini zip knife, but have since settled on the paper guillotine at TechShop. It gives much cleaner results, and the built-in ruler grid helps keep opposite edges aligned. The final pieces are as I’d hoped: distinctive, informative, and interesting as objects in themselves.

Next time, though, I think I’ll pick a different format. This one seems to require loads of work as input, and spits out mostly noise, like heat from an inefficient (but pretty) incandescent bulb.

Transatlantic Sibling Birthday Duet

My parents’ birthdays fall in March, and I knew that this year I should do something to offset 2011′s semi-fiasco*. (Sorry, guys!) So, here is a duet I put together with my talented sibling Andy! Ze lives in London. When we were in high school, our parents gave Andy a ukulele, and me a mandolin – instruments we both still play. However, although they like to hear us play together, it doesn’t happen often; we live a continent and an ocean apart.

As for the song, “Wagon Wheel” is near to my heart. It reminds me of playing with my friends, which I did a lot in Ann Arbor. Now that I’ve moved out here, I barely play with others. Whatever its lyrics, the song resonates with nostalgia and yearning. Naomi, Jess, Noam, Eric, Sophie, David, and everyone else, thank you for the music.

I played the song for Andy when I visited Edinburgh for Hogmanay, 2010-11. Later, ze posted a cover from a uke event in Edinburgh, so it was a natural choice. Hope you enjoy. (By the way, I was horribly late in delivering said video. But apparently, “it’s the thought that counts,” or somesuch.)

•••••

*”Semi-fiasco of 2011″, you don’t ask? Last year, I planned a grandiose gesture wherein I’d make 52 individual cards – one for each week in a year, also the number in a standard deck. However, I left off after about six. Perhaps I’ll pick it up again later? (When I have a method for the backs that doesn’t involve 3 stencils…)

Each card was to represent a character from some work of literature, film, or “other”, that we all liked. My family would probably get them all right, but do others stand a chance of guessing…? (No peeking at the image titles, now.)

I do hope to take this up again someday, though with three house-moves since I did them, I’ve lost track of the materials. I was using watercolors on un-stretched watercolor paper, then inking with a fine/medium quill pen. The backs were done with watercolors and copper powder, but I don’t have any pictures of those, alas.

Back down the rabbit-hole(ography)

Today, I visited Holo Land. This is a wondrous place, a friend’s home stuffed to the brim with 3D imagery and light experimentation. A few of these have overflowed into my hands — a lovely surprise!

Hooray

I also gave my new Litiholo kit a whirl; it initially arrived without a laser diode, so I had to wait another week, twitching, until this moment came. This morning, I fit in two exposures, between passing trains and our neighbors waking up to the day. I am happy to call myself a holographer again.

First Shot: Transmission Hologram

To get a good image, you need something that is a) shiny and b) stable. Your object must reflect a lot of light onto the glass plate, or no image will appear. And since you’re working with 3-10 minutes of exposure time, you run a massive risk of blurred or invisible objects if there is any vibration in the system. That includes sound waves. I plan to make an Instructable shortly that explains the whole process, so don’t worry if you can’t follow this perfectly. (You can also read my old walkthrough, which is pictureless and therefore a bit sad.)

Casting about for shiny things to image, I settled on my LED leaf and a £2 coin with Isambard Kingdom Brunel on it. Later, I will get some putty / blue tack for stability; for now, I just used a matte black object (a.k.a. coffee scoop) as a prop. The glass plate pictured is not reactive; it’s merely a setup aid.

Here’s the setup again, illuminated by the laser beam – a preview of what the hologram will look like through the holographic plate. Litiholo’s plates are identical to this small pane of glass, with a sheet of “instant” plastic film stuck to one side. It’s a big step forward from what I’m used to – this kit doesn’t require any hazmat, and as such, I’m not really sure it qualifies as a challenge at all.

Coin left in-frame

After a 4-minute exposure, here is my result. I didn’t turn on any lights until the 5-minute mark had passed, to make sure that the plate was done exposing and wouldn’t be marred. You can see that I’ve already removed the LED leaf (now off to the left). You can tell that the Litiholo folks put some thought into their work. This is a pretty damn good result for a DIY kit, on a kitchen counter, without good light seals! Really, I’m surprised and impressed at the quality – depth, brightness, and resolution are all quite decent.

Coin removed

However, I’m not so impressed with my critical-thinking skills. The holo plate leans on a plastic support, which I put on the wrong side of the stage. It blocked light from about half the plate, leaving a big blank space. At least I had 29 more plates!

I often use the analogy of a window when explaining holograms. As you can see, the unexposed plate doesn’t hold any image information, so it acts like the opaque wall next to a window frame. When you move in front of the window, you can see the whole LED leaf – but from here, to the side, half of it is invisible.

Transmission holograms must be viewed using a laser that produces the same frequency as the one used to create the hologram. (Got that?) However, if it comes out well enough, you can almost discern the image, which shows up all rainbowy under normal (non-coherent white) light.

Second Shot: Reflection (Denisyuk) Hologram

Reflection holograms, by contrast, can be viewed under regular light, though they still work best with a single point-source of light. (The sun is the best point source for any hologram.)

Since I’m used to this method, I sprang for the reflection kit upgrade (about $34 on top of $99 for the basic set). This includes a slightly rickety tower, built of the same laser-cut black acrylic as the rest of the kit, which in general works pretty well.

Here’s the reflection setup: object directly behind the plate, close but not quite touching. I assume they’ve placed the laser up on a tower, facing downward at a steep angle, so that it will be easier to illuminate the plate in regular light without contorting yourself to see the final image. I’m not sure it works very well, though, and I may end up printing my own accessories to substitute in.

This one didn’t come out nearly as well. There are several likely causes, and I don’t blame the kit. As I’ve mentioned, I was working between trains (with NextMuni as an invaluable aid), and I was in such a rush that I a) didn’t let the room settle and b) shortened the exposure time, from 10+ minutes to about 8. Of course, the train I’d feared was late… it rumbled by after I’d had a few minutes to kick myself for my haste. 28 more plates.

Since this one didn’t come out hugely well, I experimented with peeling off the plastic. It comes off readily, and readheres with ease, though you get air bubbles. This encourages me; I hope to make jewelry with these, and a thin sheet of plastic is much easier to custom-cut and set than glass.

Additionally, according to Litiholo, the plastic film is inert after developing – not susceptible to humidity like the tacky chemical emulsion I’m familiar with. Presumably, it will also stand up to sunlight better. Marvelous!

Parting Shots & Next Steps

Here’s what the holograms looked like immediately after exposing. You can easily identify the half-exposed transmission plate, and the dim bottom area of the Denisyuk. Upon exposure to white light, the blue areas faded to clear, and the two plates are now difficult to tell apart.

Next, I plan to incorporate some optical glass I’ve dug out of cameras and projectors at Noisebridge. I’d love to use lenses, as in this awesome image that pictures a *working* microscope. Since a hologram is an exact replica of how coherent light acts within a scene, a lens within a hologram will still distort whatever is behind it. (Because of this, holographic optical elements — HOEs — are an emerging solution for lightweight image manipulation.)

I have a few other ideas up my sleeve as well, but until they come to fruition, my lips are sealed! For now, good-night, sweet reader… and flights of fancy sing thee to thy rest.

Small things

A few recent projects…

Here’s a video of my Clipper card patch in action!

And here’s an Instructable I made about using solder paste. Hopefully, it will net me a free class at TechShop SF, where I’m currently building interactive lamps for 8 Bit Lit. The job involves lots of soldering, and a little bit of many other things. It’s good to work with my hands for a while.

I’m also working on a couple of paintings based on these 2D Turing machines. Sneak peek here…

Finally, I’m waiting for the laser diode to come for my Litiholo DIY holography kit. I’m enthralled by the idea of being able to make holograms again, but my kit arrived without the most important part! So frustrating. I have big plans for this, though, and I’ll be sure to share…

•••

…But what about the embroidery machine? My IndieGoGo campaign? Surely, I haven’t turned con-artist and taken those people’s money for evil? Fear not — I’m using my free TechShop class to gain access to the machines they have there. These use the same software as mine – the expensive kind! – and I should be able to transfer designs from there to my home machine. If you follow @CuriousWare on Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve been struggling with open-source software and trial Windows programs run on Wine, and I believe this is the best solution. The patches are coming!