Perversions of an Engineer
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 :-
Read on for a little bit more…
The 3 different styles of rings designed using Alibre Xpress have arrived from Shapeways!
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
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…)
Read on for the build process…
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.
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!
Continue reading “Reverse Engineering the Mazda CAN Bus – Part 1”
Shapeways had a little Halloween special last month where they offered 66% off on their new black detail material. Always wanting to try out some 3D printing for myself, this offer reeled me in!
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!
The concept is a mechanical iris diaphragm, similar to those in cameras but on a much larger scale. If you’re a Stargate fan, you would have think this is a much SMALLER scale version of the Stargate iris, then I would say that only has 20 blades…mine has 24!
There’s not much design detail out on the web, or at least no design drawings to plagiarise but I’ve seen enough stargate to try design something up myself…
Continue reading “Rapid Prototyping – Mechanical Iris Diaphragm”