roguecheddar

Pay Phone Charm

01 April 2009, 17:46:20

I just installed a brazed, rusted steel pay phone charm I made at 5th and Mill in Tempe, AZ. Photos below:

I designed the faceted gems in Solidworks, printed out templates for each face using images I made in MATLAB, cut out each face from 18g. mild steel sheet on a hydraulic shear, brazed all the pieces together with brass brazing rod and an oxyacetylene torch, cleaned up the edges with a 4" grinder, and then brazed them together with chain. I could only find zinc-plated chain so I burned off all the plating with the torch, which is probably not too advisable considering zinc fumes are bad and can give one something called "zinc flu". Finally I rusted the whole getup with a ferric nitrate solution I prepared by dissolving steel wool in nitric acid. I secured the charm to the pay phone with a padlock for safekeeping.

From Flickr user mishumishi.

Ground Zero Mouse

04 February 2009, 23:37:24

Video experimenting with the feedback-induced patterns a webcam creates when viewing its own feed projected onto a wall. I connected a 1080p digital projector to my laptop and projected the laptop's display onto a wall (the image was about 6ft. across). Next I connected a cheap webcam to my laptop and positioned it facing the wall, roughly centered on the projection, approximately 5ft. away, and as high as I could without casting a shadow on the projection. I started the webcam's test program (the webcam seems to refresh at about 10-15Hz), maximized the window, and then filmed the wall using a digital video camera placed on a small tripod on top of the projector. As I filmed I experimented with different modes of mouse movement (freehand, circle, figure-eight, zig-zag, and random). I used Windows API calls from a program I wrote in Visual Basic to control the automatic mouse movements.

Obama Poster

08 October 2008, 06:33:19

The Obama part of my propaganda poster series that I made last Spring has shown up on a few threads relating to all the ways Obama is an extremist, a terrorist, Hitler re-incarnated, etc. The people who posted just linked to my image, so I took the liberty of changing it to something more appropriate.

Links to threads with the poster:
http://forums.nonewbs.com/showthread.php?t=67217 (see FLY180's post)
http://www.sodahead.com/blog/16804/ (barkbark-247's post)

and cached copies of the original and "fixed":
original
fixed

Band Saw Safe

07 October 2008, 20:59:55

I added documentation for my recently completed band saw safe to my portfolio.

Portfolio

29 September 2008, 00:49:06

I've finally made a portfolio up here: portfolio.

Laptop Etching!

05 May 2008, 20:46:29

The Instructables folks at Maker Faire etched my laptop for free this weekend. I gave them a binary image of a fractal pattern I generated in MATLAB. For those interested I used the iterator 1/(1/z^2+1) + c, am zoomed in 1000x, and am centered somewhere around -0.4559 - 0.7181i. Etching and etch pattern images below. More of my fractal/math work.

My swell laser-etched laptop

Binary image fed to the laser cutter

My original generated fractal image

New Art Section

18 February 2008, 06:48:30

I started a new section for my art from this semester (Spring 2008), here. So far it's mostly figure drawings from my life drawing class.

Digital Media Final Project (The Aleph)

09 January 2008, 07:41:29

I posted my final project for last semester's Intro. to Digital Media course. It's a Flash animation inspired by information theory and Jorge Luis Borges' short story, "The Aleph". It's interactive; read for a while and also try clicking on words. Link.

Also, TENCLO DVD torrent (see last post)

06 January 2008, 00:34:51

torrent

Read more at their website:
backyardproductions

"Star Wars: The Emperor's New Clones" trailer

06 January 2008, 00:27:00

Youtube trailer