Monthly Archives: October 2014

My hallowe’en costume

Posted on October 31, 2014 by paulwallich

Yes, I’m going as a bar graph. I’m an ex-physicist, a tech writer and a geek, so it’s perfect. I have to admit that after 30 years of working on technical illustrations that ended up on magazine covers and people’s … Continue reading →

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Hallowe’en in a box

Posted on October 23, 2014 by paulwallich

Just add switches and a 9-year-old geek. That’s Adafruit’s FX card, which can store 2MB of sound files and spit them out to a powered speaker based on any of 11 trigger lines. With additional modes including looping, sequential (play … Continue reading →

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Inside a scanning electron microscope

Posted on October 16, 2014 by paulwallich

Some of the parts I was able to salvage. I’m a sucker for big chunks of stainless steel. Also, I am thinking maybe I could turn the sample stage into the world’s smallest-working-envelope 5-axis CNC machine.  It couldn’t deal with … Continue reading →

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Beautiful scrap

Posted on October 14, 2014 by paulwallich

Scanning electron microscopes are really heavy.  I know this because our local high school just sent theirs to the scrapyard,  and I got to spend the morning scavenging all the bits I could take off  with a screwdriver, and a … Continue reading →

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UV-curing resin as an extrusion material

Posted on October 8, 2014 by paulwallich

I’ve been working on a DLP printer project, and I’ve gotten to the point where it might be a good idea to know what kinds of layer exposure times I might expect. So I loaded up a syringe with Makerjuice … Continue reading →

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It never rains but it pours

Posted on October 7, 2014 by paulwallich

So now there seem to be three separate makerspace initiatives in town, all serving more or less disparate potential communities — youth/educational/entry-level, light hacker/maker, heavy-equipment expert maker. In some ways those are useful divisions, because you don’t necessarily want to … Continue reading →

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Getting Inspired

Posted on October 5, 2014 by paulwallich

It was raining pretty steadily, but it was definitely fun. One of the things I liked was the not-so-high-tech makers: the folks who do amazing things with printed pages, the blacksmith, the people who are starting up a sailboat-based freight … Continue reading →

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