March 2009 Entries
Update Note: While I'm keeping this post for historical value, this post is not kept up to date with my Jansen Walker, look at the Jansen Walker project page for the latest details and plans.
Original Post:
I’ve put a little bit of more time into my natural gearing walker, and got a few things done. Here is an animation of the quad-leg assembly, I plan on putting one of these assemblies on each side of the walker.
I’m still on the ropes about what type of motor to power the movement, I've been leaning towards continuous rotation servos, that would...
Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec Aperture: F/13 ISO: 100 Focal length: 50mm
The kinetic energy of this photo is great, running to meet the bus while the bus drives on. Shutter Speed: 1/320 sec Aperture: F/11 ISO: 200 Focal length: 18mm
Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec Aperture: F/5 ISO: 1600 Focal length: 18mm
Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec Aperture: F/9 ISO: 100 Focal length: 18mm
The sony PSP (pay station portable) is a great piece of hardware, a nice big screen with a decent processing power along with a some good controls and a fair amount of software features right out of the box. In my opinion the biggest competitor to the PSP is the iPhone and the iPod touch, though there are not directly equivalent. The problem with the stock firmware is that it’s locked to sony signed apps, running an alternative firmware will let you run homebrew code. There’s a plethora of conflicting info on how to flash the psp, There...
Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec Aperture: F/5 ISO: 800 Focal length: 18mm
Here’s an experiment my brother and I did a while back, involving high voltage and pickles.
The setup is an electrical cord stripped, and wrapped around two nails. The nails are the terminals that transfer the electricity into the pickle(s).
For safety the modified cord is taped down to the work surface and plugged into a power strip with a isolated switch and fuse. This allows some safety (the 15A fuse) and control (the switch) that we used to start and stop the experiment.
Immediately after switching the power on, the pickle lights up with a flickering pattern. One side of...
Cheese, cheese, everywhere cheese. Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec Aperture: F/5 ISO: 800 Focal length: 18mm I’ve taken a short break with the image-a-day (again) to spend some time on other projects, but I've resumed again and I’ll be posting every weekday.
You may or may not know that 4volt.com has been around since 2001, and in that time there’s been a fair amount of random stuff on it. Lately I’ve been slowly re-building the site, and tonight I’ve put together an archive of some of the more popular art I've posted. Some pieces are a little dated, but most of it holds up well I think. Things change in 8 years.
Shutter Speed: 1/50 sec Lens Aperture: F/10 Focal Length: 50mm
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec Lens Aperture: F/6.3 Focal Length: 50mm
Shutter Speed: 1/125 sec Lens Aperture: F/6.3 Focal Length: 50mm
In my current PC I have two power supplies, one for my motherboard and accessories, and one for my raid array.
The problem is, you cant just use a regular ATX PC power supply for dumb power without hooking it up to a motherboard. Fortunately there’s a (fairly) easy way around that. There is a wire in the main 20-24 pin ATX header that tells your power supply to turn on, and is usually the only green one.
Before we get into the details, here are two warnings:
There are dangerous voltages in your power supply, if your not...
Today a news story hit about tinyarro.ws, a url shortening domain that can appear as as a single Unicode character like: www.➡.ws/誮 I was not very familiar with unicode domains, so I did a bit of research. Unicode domains are meant to allow non-English domains to be registered with by escaping them into Punycode. For instance www.➡.ws/誮 is shown as “www.xn--hgi.ws/xn--y42a” in the source of this page. ‘XN—‘ is the Punycode notation to start the escape sequence, here is a converter I’ve found for your pleasure: http://idnaconv.phlymail.de/index.php This brought out two interesting lines of thought:...
I caught Pendulum live this weekend and ended up taking way to many photos, the good news is there was a bunch of them turned out well. There’s a new gallery over in photos. Pendulum is a live drum and bass group that I like quite a bit, as far as I can tell all the instruments are played live including drums and vocals which is rare for a drum and bass group.
I always scavenge any electronics I'm throwing out, even if I only have a limited amount of time. For a long time I’ve considered empty computer cases to be worthless, but there are a few things that are worth keeping. Excluding the power supply, most of the parts are on the front cover. The LED’s and buttons aren’t worth a whole lot, but they come with pre-soldered with a short jumper cable that's ready to be plugged into a header somewhere, there time savers. There’s also the fan and maybe a...
Update Note: While I'm keeping this post for historical value, this post is not kept up to date with my Jansen Walker, look at the Jansen Walker project page for the latest details and plans.
Original Post:
I posted a few weeks ago about the Jansen walking mechanism, and since then I've been working on a Solidworks model to test the proportions of the 12 numbers with success. Solidworks allowed me to adjust the length of any proportion in the model without redrawing anything.
I ended up using a variation of the numbers found by Rik at Lets Make Robots.
Below is an...
I’ve been playing around with Context Free lately, it’s a 2D generative art program, meaning you can create art from code. Here’s the code for the above images: 1: startshape SPIKES
2:
3: rule CENTER {
4: 10* {r 36} SPIKE { y 25}
5: }
6:
7: rule SPIKES {
...
This street art took advantage of the existing square shapes on this building to make make something anthropomorphic. From the look of the various tan and gray squares, it looks like a popular wall in the past. Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec Lens Aperture: F/10 Focal Length: 20mm