Kaetemi

Exclusive keychains I made for Tsunacon (a manga/anime convention in the Netherlands) of their mascot.
They were sold at the event, and will be sold at the Tsunacon stand on other related conventions in the Netherlands and Belgium as well.

De uitwerking van het kindertafeltje in hout. Kan ook als kastje of nachtkastje gebruikt worden. Stevig genoeg om op te zitten.

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.

So, last week I received a package that's dated next week. It contained a sample part from Stratasys printed on a Fortus machine. Looks pretty good and feels very strong as well.

Another thing I'm working on at the moment. This is a figurine stand designed specifically for prototype figures. It basically allows you to place pretty much any figure on it, by having pins that can be moved to different positions of the surface. The purpose of this is, obviously, to save money, as I won't need to print any stands for prototypes of unfinished figures.

As this is still a work in progress, it still has some issues. More specifically, with the printing of the pins. It seems my idea of having flexible pins didn't turn out that well, for two reasons. The first issue being that it seems 1mm pins have a fairly high printing failure rate. Interestingly Shapeways included the failed prints together with some extra ones that are properly printed. In the picture are supposed to be eight pins. The second issue, is that the pins are too flexible this way, and therefore don't hold on to the figure properly.

So, what I'll do next, is try to print a set of solid pins in the range of 1 to 4mm with difference of 0.1mm between each (making a nice total of about 30 pins), and see how that turns out.