Making stuff: gadgets, electronics, etc.

Building things is fun, not to mention useful for creating experimental setups. This section features posts with information on stuff I've made. Unfortunately, I don't have nearly enough time to play around in the students' machine shop of the Physics Department here at UW. I'd be milling my personal coffee mug out of Delrin right now...

  • Arduino + XBee AppleRemote prank
    Tue, 05/31/2011 - 19:12

    It's common knowledge that MacBooks and iMacs can be controlled with any Apple remote. This feature is turned on by default, so unless people manually disable remotes, or pair a specific remote to their computer, they are easy victims for a simple prank. You can control the volume, start/pause songs in iTunes, advance and go back a song in the library, and, most annoyingly, enter FrontRow by pressing the appropriate button on the remote. Of course, it would be nice not to actually have to approach the "prankee" with a conspicuous Apple remote. It would be far nicer to have a microcontroller mimic the IR codes and control everything remotely...

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  • Conquering Mt. Rainier with Matlab and Meshlab
    Sat, 02/26/2011 - 18:43

    Thanks to Kevin Ford and Janneke Hille Ris Lambers at UW I recently had the opportunity to get access to a very good-looking LIDAR data set for the area around Mount Rainier, WA. They obtained a high-resolution LIDAR map of Mt. Rainier National Park from the Puget Sound Lidar Consortium. Kevin and Janneke approached me to ask whether it's possible to create a 3D print of Mount Rainier and, naturally, I was extremely intrigued by this idea.

    The data Kevin gave me covered a bit more than 30 by 30 km with circa 10 million elevation samples. This incredibly high resolution made the map look incredibly beautiful in GIS software, but it also presented a substantial problem for me. In order to create anything printable, I had to drastically down-sample the data points. Another problem was that the elevation data behaves like a 2D sheet floating in 3D space, but in order to print something on a 3D printer, I needed nodes that describe a closed 3D volume. The project therefore involved a fair bit of data manipulation, which I describe below.

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  • From MATLAB to SolidWorks, via Illustrator
    Tue, 02/15/2011 - 11:26

    It's easy enough to create equation-driven 2D shapes in MATLAB. It turns out that it's also fairly easy to export such shapes into Solidworks and use them to create pretty nice-looking parts in SolidWorks. In this example, I illustrate how to draw a formula-driven wing shape in MATLAB, export it as a PDF, simplify the outline in Adobe Illustrator, and then import it in Solidworks to create a wing-shaped extrusion.

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  • Arduino - based camera trigger unit
    Thu, 01/06/2011 - 09:09

    I developed the camera trigger unit in order to synchronize various events and actions during free-flight experiments with hawkmoths in the wind tunnel described in a previous post. More specifically, the goal was to trigger multiple high-speed cameras and have LEDs that indicate the exact timing of electrical stimuli delivered via a miniature stimulus chip carried by a hawkmoth. (Electric stimulation of the moth is also triggered by the unit.)

    The trigger is based on an Arduino micro-controller board (http://www.arduino.cc/) and provides a timed sequence of events after a trigger is elicited either manually, or automatically with the optional laser module. The latter is used to monitor a volume in space (the trigger volume) that, when occupied by an object (a moth, for example), elicits the trigger sequence. The module can be used with one or two red or infrared laser diodes. When using one laser beam, an object crossing anywhere along the beam will elicit a trigger event. When using two beams, the volume in space in which the two beams cross defines the trigger volume.

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  • MothBones modular holder system
    Tue, 01/04/2011 - 21:34

    A modular system of interlocking pieces for holding small gadgets in place. Printed on the Daniel Lab's uPrint 3D Printer to fit a multitude of holding tasks. Standard 1/4-20 screws can be used to fasten together individual pieces. (Fall 2009 - 2010)

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  • Wind tunnel for insect flight research
    Tue, 01/04/2011 - 09:39

    Notes on the design and construction of a (relatively) cheap wind tunnel for the Daniel Lab. (Summer/Fall 2009)

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  • Making chocolate insect pupae
    Mon, 01/03/2011 - 22:07
    ManducaMold1

    Using food-grade silicone, I created a few 3D molds of moth pupae, which I then used to make tasty chocolate treats for Halloween. The photos in this post show the steps involved in the process. (Fall 2009)

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  • Making stuff: bend sensor
    Sun, 01/02/2011 - 09:15

    When exploring sensors for reading out behavioral (i.e. motor) output from an animal, I came across bend sensors that can be incorporated into clothing (http://www.talk2myshirt.com/blog/archives/724). By using thin copper foil, velostat, and epoxy, I was able to shrink the dimensions of the sensor to about 15 mm length. Unfortunatly, I needed something even smaller, and something more compliant. But here's the basic idea...

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