Tag Archives: nyancat

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Nyancat cake mold, working PoV [not so yoyo], vending corkscrew test (mod servo for continuous rotation)

nyancake
Uhh I’ve been doing a lot of blogging and neglecting my other work, so here is minimalist style ftw.

nyancake? nyangummi?

My hall’s thanksgiving (putzgiving, alums come back for this) was two Saturdays ago. I tested out the nyancat cake mold:

for ease of “parameter optimization” runs, I used even-simpler-cake-recipe: cake mix and sprite as the only ingredients (apparently a dieting trick. comes out fine, although for molds probably want to let bubbles settle for a bit after pouring and before intensive mixing).
apply release agent, aka cooking spray / pam — otherwise doesn’t come out well. also,  sprite+cakemix mixture should not be too gloopy. add flour if accidentally pour too much sprite.

many fail results. Here, did not let bake long enough. (much longer than box says — I baked a bit lower temp based on silicone mold research, ~325deg C, and for say 1 or 2 hours)
demolded too quickly, also did not cover in saran wrap to retain moisture afterward
nyancake party~! nyan nyan nyan
probably the best of all my nyancakes. you can see that the minimum mold feature size — the sprinkles — were too small for the resolution of the cake mix and actually resulted in holes.
speed cooling jello in freezer. recipe used: the lego gummies from instructables
nyanjello = almost perfect mold replica. you can see the sprinkles are supposed to stand out, as opposed to how the nyancakes turned out. however, more limited / difficult coloring opportunities with jello than with cake (which you can just apply frosting / food coloring to)
Persistence of Vision Yoyo
I also figured out the issue with the MAS.863 makefiles causing my weird “compiler” bug (actually, compiler options / makefile bug):

Class-based makefile includes:
avr-objcopy -j .text -O ihex ./v0.1.45.out ./v0.1.45.c.hex
man avr-objcopy
       -j sectionname
       –only-section=sectionname
  Copy only the named section from the input file to the output file.
  This option may  be  given more than once.  Note that using this
  option inappropriately may make the output file unusable. >__> <__<
So the class makefiles should be fixed to include “-j .data”The internet says
“The makefile above DOES NOT create a proper HEX image and is a bad example. When creating an  image, not only does the text section (which holds the code) need to be included but the data section (which holds any initialized data) also needs to be included.
The remedy for this is correct .hex rule to to copy the data setion as well
Example:
$(OBJCOPY) -j .text -j .data -O ihex $(PROJECT).out $(PROJECT).hex
” http://www.micahcarrick.com/avr-tutorial-digital-output.html

bmayton: that actually explains a lot of odd bugs that I’ve been seeing with people

using constant arrays, since the array data is never getting copied into the
program

So the actual model of what was causing my bug was, I believe, without calling another function the compiler goes ahead and uses the array to insert the correct commands into the compiled code. But when I used a subfunction, the compiler loads the subfunction which the microcontroller calls, but the ucontroller does not have the array data to look up what to set DDRB and PORTB to.

Anyway, then I proceeded to hack together terrible!code and get PoV working. I used oloepede’s sample image ‘cos I’m all about the laziest and quickest tests and ‘cos olopede is awesome.

eheh derp ripped off ISP traces / headers
works fine waving it by hand (without camera extended exposure time, hard to see entire “olopede” message — can see maybe three letters at a time. dead reckoning PoV timing — no sensors.) 

Doesn’t do so hot on the drill. Mess with timing? Although I spun it slow and fast (and in-use yoyo spins quite fast). May require sensors (fan pov as seen on dealextreme — product designer has better idea of speed of motor while yoyo has more variable speed. maybe they used hall effect sensors, ‘cos it was resilient to me slowing down the blades.) to get stable image.

See video:
https://picasaweb.google.com/113942194695013581888/PoVYoyoPersistenceOfVision#5681157457783660930

Vending machine
Right, essentially two weeks until final projects due. Aka time to start cramming on vending machine.

What do I have on hand? Arduino uno, extra servos leftover from when I bought out all the old 2.007 servos., zipties, handheld drill, a corkscrew. Found some rectangular metal thing to act as guiderails lying around MITERS scrap pile. Also found a block of wood lying around the floor.

Mod a servo  to be
continuous rotation servo
(essentially turn it into a cheap RC motor that comes with motor speed controller in a convenient package for mounting) —
aka remove mechanical stop on gear 

apply flush cutters to stop on gear

and remove pot, which like all pots doesn’t turn infinitely — make sure to be gentle ‘cos pot is held in by internal screw, why it doesn’t just fall out normally

see blurry screw at bottom. Also, I wasn’t gentle and cracked the PCB. Maybe it is inevitable for these servos (motor is soldered onto pcb so not much flexibility there) to get to pot screw. Surprisingly the servo still works…
stick pot on outside, chew a hole for it in the casing — i abused flush cutters

see How to Hack a Servo by Daniela Faas http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/2/sp11/2.007/courseMaterial/topics/topic12/other/Servo_Hack_large/Servo_Hack_large.pdf)

springs / coils
Attach to corkscrew (from real vending machine) I bought off of ebay to see what real mass manufactured ones are like so I can make fake ones DIY like http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-your-own-springs-in-seconds/

Drill out servo horns (1/8” bit fits zipties I found) and attach to corkscrew with zipties

it vends a block! haha. terrible setup is terrible.

Video here:
https://picasaweb.google.com/113942194695013581888/VendingMachineOpenHardware#5681154916854562050

Yea, not a very interesting proof-of-concept (a “duh are you an idiot” one), but it was very satisfying to me.

Oh right, I tried to use hot glue to hold the pot in one place, since that affects how the servo reacts to servo.write() (pot adjusts when it goes fwd/reverse) — I just used
myServo.write(50) with a 0.5 sec delay
myServo.write(90) with a 3 sec delay
myServo.write(130) with a 0.5 sec delay
to calibrate the pot so that servo was completely still at 90. And then attempted to hot glue. a bit flaky– not good enough for long-term banging around but good enough for dirty proto.

yes, i stole arduino from hexarideablepod. arduino uno with a small breadboard on top and 3 male header pins to connect arduino (Vcc, Gnd, and SIG — arbitrarily pin 2 in my case) and servo. unplugged in this pic.

Not clear from pics, but to test it I’m holding the servo still with my hand.

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Lasers and such (aluminum business cards, wood and paper etching, edge-lit acrylic signs, thermoforming

I’m proud to say that I’ve sunk at least 40 man-hours of other’s people time into nyancat 🙂
(~150,000 views * 1 sec each / 3600 secs/hr  = 41.7 hours)

from 6:20am today (11/8/11) http://imgur.com/HnoAf

Makes me regret not thinking about watermarking my images (free publicity!). Thankfully, these are but brief lapses in my unfailing devotion to laziness.

Meanwhile, I’ve been exploring the joys of the lasercutter. I found some scrap wood sitting around the lasercutter and etched some of my best friend’s art (shout-out to Alice Chung! http://the-crowned.deviantart.com/)

I didn’t know what type of wood it was so I approximated:
material, lens, thickness, ppi, power, speed, description
aircraft plywood        2    1/8″        500    15%        80%        raster
aircraft plywood        2    .17        300    40%        3%        cut ~.17

I also want to make edge-lit signs and found some scrap acrylic. I checked out some real edge-lit signs, the ones used on the newer-style EXIT signs, looking straight up at them, and you can see the individual blips indicating a strip of LEDs. I thought they might have been using a fluorescent tube, which was my other though for lighting — strip out a discarded scanner’s tube and make a lamp ballast for it, then stick it over the acrylic. Todo: buy some nice strips of RGB LEDs. http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2009/09/22/making-an-edge-lit-acrylic-sign/ ~$7: http://ledshoppe.com/Product/led/LE5045.htm

this was .24” thick acrylic:
ACRYLIC (clear)        2    1/2″        500    80%        50        RASTER, 1/32 inch
ACRYLIC (clear)    (tinted)    2    1/4″        500    100%        1.4        cuts through 1/4” (.21”)

I’m sitting in the media lab shop right now helping a friend, Cathy Wu, make business cards for her imminent plane trip to some conference somewhere (_sigh_ smart people…). I was asleep in my room at 11pm when I heard a loud knocking, which turned out to be a hyper Cathy excited about cutting out business cards with the laser cutter 🙂 I had some anodized aluminum let over from the waterjet clock class / Kevin Rustagi, so there we go.
Giraffe design courtesy of Laura Shumaker, another awesome friend.

Settings used:
METAL ENGRAVE    2    n/a        400    50%        10        (Vector) Engraves into most sheet metals. (incl. anodized Al)to confirm: “my impression was that CO2 bleaches the dye in the anodize coating, while YAG actually penetrates the anodize to etch the aluminum”

The 100 watt lasercutter is definitely not awesome enough to cut this out (we tried full power really slow speed high ppi and it looked to have cut to the same depth as the etching). Maybe the BEAM lasercutter? We settled on using the power shears to cut it out.

I also learned that one can etch paper without burning it up!

Construction paper    2    0.01”        500    6%        80%        etch; — @100% speed, 7% min. to etch. @6%, 97% min. speed

thin cardstock — 1mm thick

People online seem to be getting lighter engravings, though, and I can’t figure that out! I tried all sorts of different settings for the construction paper and all I get is the burnt look. The cardstock I know for sure is white through and through and it also gives me this brown color. ??? I need to figure out this mystery:

http://www.epiloglaser.com/tl_paper.htm

Some very useful links:
Different materials at a glance, with examples (look at the dress under textiles! amazing)
http://lasercuttingshapes.com/page/materials
Everything ever about the Universal 100W CO2 laser and all the possible parameters:
http://www.inlay.com/cnc/laser/index.html
Supplier Acrylics, fluorescent (looks edge-lit without needing lighting):
http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/default.aspx?catid=442&parentcatid=443&clickid=searchresults

Ladyada’s examples page:
http://www.adafruit.com/laser/
With more details here:
http://www.ladyada.net/library/laser/settings.html
What people charge for some lasercutting services:
http://www.tree-fox.com/laser-engraved-and-cut-business-card-110.html
And pumpkins! Plastic ones though. We have real ones on hall that I was pondering…
http://www.advancedwj.com/gpage.html1.html

In other news, my surface mount soldering skills have vastly improved with a touch of patience. These all used the: tin one copper pad | tweezer solder the component onto that pad so that it’s straight | solder the other pad on | reflow the first pad. This seemed tedious to me in the past, but it actually goes pretty quickly and helps me place my components correctly (darn lack of silkscreening) since I’ll go through and tin one pad for all the components.

I also printed tiny-to-be-painted-and-turned-into-earring nyancat:

This is the 3d printer:

Meanwhile in 2.008 we thermoformed for the first time. Here’s the thermoform machine:

turned out pretty well, almost none of the webbing we were afraid of.

The machine is super-straightforward to use. I’ll write it down sometime.

then you use the punch/die to cut out the part you want
some of the injection molded parts. The metal shim actually really affects the shrinking of the part, so our ring and body parts didn’t press-fit together (both used a 3% shrinkage estimate). To be fixed!

Oh, and my food-grade silicone arrived. $17 for a lb off of amazon.

And I shopbot’d a new foam positive. But the silicone negative mold turned out fuzzy :/ with bits of construction foam attached:

Make lots of sacrificial cake until all the foam is melted away? I’m not sure. This silicone will stand up to 400F while the foam melts pretty easily (eg at the hint of a heat gun).

My vending machine coils arrived off of ebay. They definitely look like something I could make by hand.

Also, I learned that ftdi breakout boards are indeed substitutes for ftdi cables. See here for a cool look at what you can do with ftdi:
http://hackaday.com/2009/09/22/introduction-to-ftdi-bitbang-mode/
and some more about ftdi (e.g. vs. avr programmer):
http://www.ladyada.net/learn/breakoutplus/ftdifriend.html

Oh, for 6.131, my final project, some research:
Our normal 6.131 555 pwm generator will not work here. Servo “PWM” signals are very specific — 2 to 4% duty cycle, 20msec period.

http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/200106/16csscnt.htm

use a servo tester then:
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=17143 $5
or implement the circuit:
http://www.societyofrobots.com/robotforum/index.php?topic=13833.0

Also, turns out you can totally do diy soldermask (to mask the circuit traces you don’t want to accidentally solder to):
http://retromaster.wordpress.com/pcb-making/ via http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/15792/diy-solder-mask-toner-transfer
and a product from seeedstudio:
http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/index.php?title=Solder_Mask_Ink

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Nyantart, “a strawberry poptart laser-engraved with nyan cat”

There’s something about watching the media lab lasercutter etch nyancat onto a strawberry poptart that is soul-deep satisfying. Surely now the quality of my education is irrefutably worth my tuition…

meta-nyan! not yet recursive…

The most difficult part of this turns out to be not eating the poptarts long enough to make it from the grocery store to the lasercutter. I’ve wanted to do this for weeks, ever since I saw the Louisville hackerspace posting: http://www.lvl1.org/2011/07/15/new-laser-cutter/, but never made it to the lasercutter until last night. (and I’d never even eaten poptarts before the first time I bought poptarts with the intention of lasercutting them, hah).

that’s the original inspiration on the right

So, first things first, go to google images and find an image to trace (I used: http://thelemurblog.com/gallery/Nyan%20Cat.png). I tried to do my grid + draw lines method that I used with solidworks, now in GIMP, but ended up simply using select-by-color + bucket-fill-entire-selection.

this is the exact picture I used, if you want to laser-etch one of your own.

Then, play around with the lasercutter settings.

This is what I found to work (sorry for the terrible formatting):

MATERIAL:  LENS:  THICKNESS:  PPI:  POWER (%):  SPEED (%):  EFFECT (cut/etch)
Poptart            2    n/a        500    40%        80%        Light raster (will cut through sugar but not burn poptart)
Poptart            2    n/a        500    40%        50%        Medium raster (will cut through sugar and lightly singe poptart)
Poptart            2    n/a        500    76%        50%        Strong raster (will cut through sugar and darkly singe poptart)
on the universal laser x2-600 (co2, 100w).

I stuck it in Coreldraw on a 32×18” bed to make sure it was placed correctly, then thanks to the Windows printer drivers, I simply hit Ctrl-P, set the settings, and printed it.

laser, do my bidding!
a few minutes and done~

Verdict: Still pretty tasty. The burnt ones tastes burnt, but both don’t taste as bad as the lasercut sugar cookies.

light and strong rasters, side-by-side

reddit?
Haha, I put this up on facebook and not half an hour later it pops up on reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/lyktg/just_a_strawberry_poptart_laserengraved_with_nyan/

I wonder how it made its way there o.o?? I only posted it on facebook (this blog post was after the fact), so it’s a little creepy.

FAQ
People wondering how they can make one of their own–
http://fslaser.com/40w-deluxe-hobby-laser-engraver-and-cutter
$2.5 to 3k 40W CO2 laser may be your best bet for cheap. It comes with caveats, though, see: http://hackaday.com/2011/04/14/buying-a-laser-cutter-from-china/ and other reviews online.
Probably a better idea to instead look at the list of hacker/makerspaces and contact your nearest one to see if they have a lasercutter you can use. http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces
Alternatively, cut a stencil out of aluminum foil and blowtorch-singe or stovetop-pan-singe the appropriate parts. Although this tends to make a melty mess and I’m not sure how you would cut a stencil for a shape like this — I guess connect some areas with thin bridges like they do for stenciled letters.
Although probably not recommended depending on what else was cut in the lasercutter, the resultant poptart is safe to eat — it’s the equivalent of a poptart which was super-toasted in some areas (all the laser is doing is dumping heat into some parts of the poptart, it’s not dumping radiation or anything).
In fact, I stuck it in my hall’s free-food table and both nyantarts were gone in an hour. 🙂

Oh, and more pictures here:
https://picasaweb.google.com/113942194695013581888/Nyantart#

Other nyancat shenanigans in the last month of two: (e.g. cutting it out of aluminum, making a mold for it): http://www.orangenarwhals.com/search/label/nyancat

Todo
Next up: embed one of these suckers into the poptart and have it sing too!

http://www.instructables.com/id/Musical-Greeting-Card/

Then, after that, make a pressfit cookie nyancar. 🙂 Like this, but with gingerbread (this is done in masonite) and with a nyancat center:


http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/MIT/863.09/people/mellis/pressfit/index.html