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Yes, that is “Colour” not “Color” for all your Americans out there!

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Model boat fleet fun

Glorious model warships pounding at each another with cannons, and in the midst of all that is my ‘floating camera’ contraption that didn’t work too well but worked…it floated, it took photos…it lived up to its name…madox Floating Camera…

That's no battleship...

Nice sunny day, perfectly still water, a lunch box floats with one thruster on to skew it to the 'right'...

The results weren’t too bad from the onboard video recording, just a few issues with camera alignment and disconnections when using my friend’s laptop (mine ran out of juice).  Here’s a sample clip of the captured footage :-

And one more super nice video courtesy of Andy (aka not me) :-

Read on for more photos and videos

EDIT : PHOTO GALLERY UPDATED, NEW VIDEOS ADDED! CAPS LOCK IS EVIL!

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It floats, it moves, its held together by duct tape!

Just a short photo/video post of a couple of test runs in the bath tub…

Read on for more videos and photos of this test run…

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Just a teaser that all (most?) the parts for my ‘MFC’ is ready (It could be Madox’s F‘ed-up Contraption) has all arrived and ready for assembling when I find the time.  Hopefully before the Australian Battle Group meet in June where I hope to use the contraption (…erm camera) to film the ships shooting each another to smithereens.

Picture time :-

Most of the gear laid out on carpet

Read on for a little bit more…

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The 3 different styles of rings designed using Alibre Xpress have arrived from Shapeways!

The various rings from Shapeways next to a Ponoko test card

The ‘thin wire one’ (can’t think of a name) has never been printed before.  It was first dreamt up in the shower , I’m surprised how well a scribble on the fogged up glass of the shower turned out printed in stainless steel!

Lets have a better look

Stainless steel and bronze rings

Stainless steel and bronze rings

Hey look, there’s my invoice.  $1.32 USD for the ‘thin wire one’ (have to think of a name…or have to remember what I named it  on Shapeways…) – great price eh?

The print quality is very good though it appears (not sure) that some post processing (polishing?) was done.

Nothing much else to say!  Have to move on to the next post…Ciao!

Long story short:  Got a new 40″ LCD TV, need a TV stand.  Didn’t want to spend $200 on some crappy box stand.  Didn’t want to make a plain stand.  Thought that laser cutting + bamboo + silly design ought to make a good combination.  (This is the WTF is it thing…)

Death to the unbelievers who thought this will collapse!

Read on for the build process…

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Visualizing or visualising?  Doesn’t really matter.

The idea here is to render the Sydney Rail Network (aka CityRail) using Cytoscape, an open source application typically used by researchers to visualizing bioinformation.  My original idea was actually to visualize something plain like Facebook friend networks but decided on the CityRail niche because it partly relates to my work.

Behold the CityRail Galactic Empire...(Larger image after the break)

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Controller-Area Network or CAN Bus is one of many automotive communication buses for communications between various ‘car computers’.  Information such as speed, fuel consumption, accelerator pedal position is all transmitted between the various controllers of a car akin to ‘fly-by-wire’ control systems of aircraft but I guess ‘drive-by-wire’ is more appropriate in this case.

There are other rival bus technologies include LIN (Local Interconnect Network) which is supposed to be a lower cost alternative to CAN, but I’m not interested in that.  Why?  My car uses the CAN bus, not LIN, not Ethernet.  So lets go about figuring what can be gleened from the communications whizzing around my car!

Aside from CAN bus, my car has a pig too (Long story). This photo is from 2 years ago and the pig no longer has the weird thing hanging from its belly or the tag on its ass...

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So I set out to design something in the shortest amount of time and yet would still give me a good ‘feel’ of what 3D printing is capable of today.  The time constraint was probably also due to the fact I read about the offer at midnight and wanted to send it to print before I sleep   Result? Concept, Design, Upload, Ordered all within 2 hours!

Concept