Creating With Code

In the previous posts in this series, I hacked up a Canon camera to take pictures with an electronic trigger, built a cable to connect the camera to my MakerBot, and hacked the MakerBot’s firmware to enable it to trigger the camera in response to commands from the controlling computer. The final step was to [...]

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While I know I should be finishing my MakerBot time-lapse camera series, I took some time for another project to play with some Processing. The above image was rendered in Processing, in real time in just couple of minutes! Basically, I wanted to take a simple shape, defined by an SVG path, and fill it [...]

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In the previous post in this series, I figured out how to wire up my hacked Canon SD300 with CHDK. I chose to use the “D9″ port on the Extruder controller board, thinking that should make the software as simple as setting pin 9 to “HIGH” for a brief time whenever I wanted to trigger [...]

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  On Thursday, March 25th, I spoke about desktop fabrication and the MakerBot Cupcake CNC 3D printer at Dorkbot Pittsburgh. After some slides, I gave a printing demo with my Cupcake, Makerbot #131. You can find my slides above. I’ll post the video when it becomes available.

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Recently (thanks to the Internet), I figured out how to remote control a digital camera over USB using CHDK. However, if I wanted my MakerBot to be able to automatically control that camera, I needed a way to wire it up! CHDK’s remote USB trigger functionality works by detecting when it receives power over USB.  [...]

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One problem with making time-lapse videos of MakerBot prints is the fact that the MakerBot works by moving the build platform (and therefore the object being built) around in the XY plane, resulting in an unwatchable blur. It recently occurred to me that, since the MakerBot is such a hackable platform, I could probably make [...]

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One of the things I’ve been longing to do with my mobile photo-sharing site Camura is to offer image annotations, like objects and faces.  Over the last couple of years I have been increasingly frustrated by the appearance of face tagging on services like Facebook, and the recent addition of face recognition to iPhoto has [...]

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I’ve been into hardware hacking on and off for much of my life, but I’ve never really had the time and confidence to design and build my own hardware. In recent years, projects like the open source Arduino have been slowly convincing me that I just might be able to do this stuff. When a [...]

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I find Google to be a more and more valuable resource as time goes on, especially when seeking knowledge about how to make this new MacBook act like I want it to. One thing I noticed early on was that pressing Tab to move around various interfaces, from Finder dialogs to web pages, would only [...]

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I recently purchased a MacBook to use as my primary development system. One of my first plans was to get up and running with Rails on this new machine. Given that Leopard (OS X 10.5) comes with Ruby version 1.8.6 and RubyGems 1.0.1, I thought I would be in good shape, but there were a [...]

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