I ran the first machining job with my newly operational Lumenlab Micro CNC robot (did you hear the champagne cork pop?). I say newly operational, since I won’t consider this thing “finished” for a long time, if ever. I anticipate fitting new tools to the machine to do different things for years to [...]

I am now so close to joining the desktop fabrication/manufacturing revolution that I can smell it. Unfortunately for me, that smell is the reek of burning semiconductor, but I’ll get to that later.

I got the PC controller (EMC running on Ubuntu) and stepper motor driver boards all wired up and working great. The [...]

I started assembling my Lumenlab Micro desktop CNC gantry robot and “personal manufacturing workstation”.
All your base are belong to Lumenlab
I was originally going to save a few dollars by making a base for the machine out of MDF, an idea that I never really liked that much. So I started looking for suitable aluminum [...]

I love building things from kits almost as much as I love building things from scratch, and I think that it’s safe to say that the latest kit to show up on my doorstep is going open up a whole new world of scratch-building for me.

MicRo
The micRo is a 3-axis CNC robot being offered by [...]

Taken – read Flickr notes.
”The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk is a progressive lending library of electronic components. An internet meme in physical form halfway between P2P zip-archive sharing and a flea market. It arrives full of wonderful (and possibly useless) components, but you will surely find some treasures to keep. You [...]

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.

UPDATE:

The final laser blast effect was leaving me a bit limp, so I decided to add a little motion in the form of a 10 LED chaser that will run down the side of the blaster as it fires.

The Chaser is supposed to be some sort of “pulse generator” ramping up to discharge a laser bolt.

You can see the effect in action In this YouTube video. Now THAT’s excitement!

I‘m kind of getting lightsabered out. I promise that this will be my last mention of them for a while.
But I did have some leftover lightsaber making supplies sitting around after Halloween, so I used them to build a “saber” that I could actually use. In place of the blade, I installed a [...]

I think that I may have just out-nerded myself. You see, the 2-minute dueling sabers were fun for a couple of days, but they weren’t the most durable things in the world and were a bit lacking in the realism department. So I decided to build a nicer set of “elegant weapons [...]

A 5th grade tinkerer named Luigi Maiorano built this fine little working hydroelectric power plant and showed it off at my kid’s school science fair.