Kaetemi

So, I recently bought an Arduino. It's a programmable microcontroller board for prototyping circuits. I got one of Sparkfun's kits, which has some random cool stuff in it as well, such as a bend sensor, a fancy soft slider, and LEDs.

The circuit in the above picture is a digital-to-analog converter, more specifically an R-2R DAC, with some LEDs plugged into it. There is PWM output available on the Arduino, but it didn't seem to run at a high enough rate for getting some sound out of it. I rebuilt this with the serial-to-parallel IC that also came with the kit, 10kOhm resistors, and a transistor. There were just enough resistors in the kit.

The green wires go to a speaker. Near the green wires is an orange wire that goes to an analog input of the Arduino, which is used at setup to map the actual voltage at that point to all the possible digital values, because the transistor isn't very linear in it's input/output relation. Works good enough.

Ordered a few hundred more resistors, a bunch of ICs, and some more things, to try out some more stuff.

Got some nice 3d print samples from Shapeways.

To try out the 'Full Color Sandstone' material at Shapeways, I ordered a print for a simple but obviously colorful test piece.

The material kind of feels like a small rough piece of delicate wood to me.
Physical detail seems to be pretty good, but I get the impression that the 1024px (about 850dpi) color texture I included got downsampled to around 128px (about 100dpi) or something, because there are visible loose pixels where there are supposed to be thin lines.

The circle is 3cm diameter with 3mm thickness, the small border on the side is 1mm.

Here's a picture of the top side:

And here's one of the bottom side:

As you can see, if you compare them closely, the bottom side shows printing lines, while the top side surface is perfectly flat.

Also, here's a picture with backlight, showing some slight transparency on the thin border:

An interesting effect of this bit of transparency, is that you have some minimal subsurface scattering in the lighting of the object.

To get around the downsampling issue, I think the safest choice would be to disconnect the texture UVs completely whereever you need to texture a sharp shape in your object, so that the colored shape is polygon based and not bitmap based, and only really use the texture space for soft color detail.

The color quality remains quite close to the original texture colors, but is slightly more yellowish for some colors.

When dropping the object on the ground, only from the 1mm border break off small pieces, the 3mm seems to be strong enough to survive that.

DAE Studios, intro logo. I did the sound effects in Audacity. Graphics were done by Nick.