Drones, DIY-style

May 16

Here’s a great New York Times writeup of DIY Drones, a burgeoning community of people making unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs. It’s really impressive what they’ve done in such a short period, only being started in 2007 by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine. It’s one of the fantastic business success stories of the growing Maker movement, clearing filling a need of people to make things easily in a collaborative way. It helps that UAVs and quadcopters are so cool.

Check out the video taken at the Autonomous Vehicle Competition with Chris. An autonomous dinosaur makes an appearance.

0

Tinkerer's rules

May 11

From Wondermark’s The Tinkerer’s Handbook.

0

Super massive touch screen

May 5

Pretty sure don’t have room for this. The curved screen adds a lot to the immersive factor, much like IMAX screens and reality, which is pretty immersive.

Tags: tech
0

Interactive display wall

Apr 18

Walking around the new big bio research building Institutes for Discovery on the UW campus I saw this really sizable interactive display wall. It’s open to the public in the ‘Town Center.’

Float4 Interactive :: Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery from Float4 Interactive on Vimeo.

Tags: local,tech
[43.072830, -89.407928]
0

Making of a bike

Apr 13

The attention to detail, the variety of shopwork required, and the craftsmanship going into a single custom Soulcraft bike frame produce this gorgeous video.

FROM STEEL: The Making of a Soulcraft from michael evans on Vimeo.

0

Earth is not a sphere

Apr 8

3D map of Earth’s gravity. It’s the (exaggerated) shape of the Earth’s surface if completely covered by water. If someone mentions that Earth is a sphere you can correct them, if it makes sense to do so. Animation here.

0

Overlay comparisons

Feb 11

While looking for some new fixed-width fonts I came across the below image which is a really intuitive way of visualizing the differences between a given set of fonts, created simply by overlaying corresponding letters.

Searching to see if this idea was used elsewhere and found it used in a comparison of large planes on Wikipedia. The removal of any interior plane detail makes the comparison not visually cluttered by any extraneous information and the overlaying of the planes makes scale comparisons instantaneous.

It is additionally a simple effect to produce, needing only scaled and aligned overlayed layers. Below is an image I created of the two most recent Arduino development boards.

Tags: design
0

Something's small head

Nov 21

More fantastic small-scale photos from Nikon Small World Awards.

0

634 W Main St

Sep 1

I created my first downtown building using Google SketchUp, which made it into the Google Earth 3D buildings layer where anyone/everyone can see it.

I did a little walk-about around town looking for a good first building to make, i.e. geometrically simple and easily photographable and found a good fit at 634 West Main Street in an old brick building.

It was actually easier to create than I thought it would be, although it did take a bit of time but just following this tutorial was all the direction needed. More to come.

[43.067490, -89.392738]
0

Board layouts using math

Jul 28

A unique and visually interesting way to make printed circuit boards layouts, inspired by a type of mathematical diagram. It looks a lot different than the more traditional, angular lines of the boards on the right.

0