Recent Maker Activity at Les's Lab

[Les Hall]

So there is plenty of recent activity at the New Braunfels Satellite MakerSpace (not officially and yes it is Maker not Hacker (mostly)) AKA Les's Lab.  Here is a video if my first "Jingle Machine":  

https://youtu.be/wLqEPZiYrj0

This little guy is made of a computer (Adafruit "Metro Mini" Uno equivalent) controlled stepper motor, 3D printed base, planetary gear system, and jingle bells bowl with counterrotating floor and walls.  It's a goofy contraption that is attempting to tear itself apart, so now I only get it out for show and tell.  At full speed with a full load of 18 jingle bells (one full bag, 1 inch diameter bells) it sounds like a train of Christmas approaching dangerously fast!

It's all part of my Christmas year round thing this year.  Every month the 24th is Christmas eve and the 25th is Christmas day.  Complete with holiday and Christian themed music that will put a tear in the eyes of even the toughest cowboy in town!  Plus now i have smelly stuff and a tree with fiber optic lights so the illusion of Christmas is - well, somewhat convincing! 

The second of three projects worth mentioning is the Claddagh cross that my friend Shar made for me.  It symbolizes love, loyalty, and friendship.  And is painted at the center of this lovely cross painting of Sher's.  

Well I put the painting on display in my room and someone walked in and said he'd like a 3D printed version of it.  So I took a photo of the painting, doctored up the background to solid white in Gimp, and then imported the .png file into OpenSCAD (what, me addicted to OpenSCAD?  maybe...) where I removed the background and morphed it into what you see on the screen of the attached image.  Three of the printed crosses are shown.  

I also did a morpho butterfly that turned out wonderfully.  The variations in color of the hand-painted images translate into height variations that a good enough printer (like my beloved Ultimaker 2+) can do a good enough job of capturing in plastic.  These height variations along with translucent PLA filament from www.atomicfilament.com or www.printedsolid.com (no affiliation, just where i shop) look fantastic in various lighting conditions.  

OK third and final project is AIvan.  My life companion robot is just some ideas, some earlier cheesy hardware builds that are lost to the scrounge monster, and some fresh new software that I have recently programmed.  

He is called Ivan, and his AI needed a name so AI + Ivan = AIvan, why of course!  Below see a (now outdated already) screen capture showing AIvan's brain activity.  At first it was unsustained due to complete loss of brain activity.  Then it was infinite numbers filling his brain, and now finally sustained and evolving oscillations!  

Next is training and I have reasoned a good scheme for that and after training comes dreaming!  Then when AIvan is nearly ready for prime time, I will upload him to the Google Cloud for wicked fast run times.  

The Google Cloud is truly phenomenal.  As I read the web site on it, I was amazingly impressed with every fact mentioned, it's just beyond everything you'd want in a Supercomputer cloud.  They have stuff like transparent maintenance.  If a server dies, they just swap it out and start your jobs at the last save point for that server!  The Cloud covers the entire planet (or lots of it) with crazy fast optical connections and the servers are speed daemons too, plus not only is the usage cost low, they give you a $300 USD sign-on bonus...  And it will make a nice home for AIvan and possibly a singularity for many AIvans - who knows?!

OK that's this month at Les's Lab.  Les out, praise the Lord!  

Les