So…I put Sean’s Harrow through it’s paces, and here are some of my newest desktop backgrounds.

First you get the basic render down. I use 32-bit color with OpenEXR file format, saving z-buffer info too, just, you know, in case you need it later. You should get something like this… kind of flat when viewed on a crappy computer screen, but i assure you there is a ton of color info there for fine tuning later.

With all that extra color depth, you can easily fine tune the contrast, like so.

Then you need to come up with the shadow version… Andrew Price from BlenderGuru does this in a new Scene. I like the stark contrast… when you look carefully the sharp edges tell you that you are looking at a perspective view.

Put it all together, and you get a softly-back-lit Logo. WIN!

And I just got done with a talk at ScienceOnTap Philly! It was a truly excellent night! Special thanks to the Organizers and also the Hivers who came out or emailed in their support! You peeps are the best.

Here are some pics via the Twittersphere. Thanks to the photographers for posting!

days, ranging from Chocolateers, Digital Artists, to young children asking about 3D printing toys and parts for their projects. Discussion started about 10 minutes after we left Maker Faire for what to do next year. Check out the album for some quick snapshots of this year’s events including Karaoke, Thumb Wrestling, and of course, the occasional interview.

Tuesday – DIY Music Night

Wednesday – Open House

Thursday – Game Night Featuring Tetris Arm Wrestling Tournament

Friday – PTW Gala demonstration (offsite)

Events at Hive76 Monday through Thursday start at 7pm and 

ARE OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Friday Gala Ticketing information available here.

So we are running a quick workshop to show members and others how to use these new tools. Stop by if you are curious. It will be like a mini open house.

Training workshop
Sunday, 3/25, 2pm
at Hive76

RSVP with a comment if you’re coming. See you there!

This Saturday we’ll have Matthew Wettergreen here from Rice University to learn together how to build a MendelMax 3D RepRap printer.

MendelMax is the new rapid-to-assemble Mendel variant based on an extruded aluminum frame. Very rigid, very nice looking. Stop on by to check it out!

11 am – 8 pm
Saturday March 3rd @ Hive76

Hive76′s Art Hackathon

March 10th and 11th, 3pm to 7pm

For the second weekend in March, Hive76 is hosting a day of smashing, cutting, gluing, taping, painting, and general making and frivolity. We’re calling it “Art Hackathon”. Inspired by the Bravo TV Series Work of Art, and following closely in the footsteps of Art Hack Day, the event will focus on the rapid creation of meaningful works of art out of a provided supply of recycled materials.

Hive76 will provide massive piles of cardboard, tubs of glue, masking tape, tubs of spackle, box cutter blades, and a few cans of various colors of spray paint, to let every participating individual or team create a work of their choosing. The works will be based on a single theme, to be announced at the beginning of the event.

The event is split across two, four-hour days. While participants are free to use the time as they wish, the time is designed to provide time for planning on and a moderate amount of building on the first day, with some drying and curing time overnight before finishing up the next day.

A fee of $25 per person will be charged at the door, to cover the cost of materials and food that will be provided during the event for both days. Please RSVP for the event before March 6th by emailing smcbeth@hive76.org.

I began by searching on DuckDuckGo for familiar imagery for the concepts of art and hacking. For art, the image of the paintbrush and pallet was very common. For hacking, the skull and crossbones shows up. Well, for hacking, photos of people sitting around tables, staring at computer screens, completely oblivious of any photographers in the room, was also quite common, but that’s rather difficult to capture in a logo.

I did a few sketches on paper of the idea of a Skull and CrossBrushes, but it was too simple and too cartoony. I need something that is stonger, with a lot more color. At this point, I got an idea. The event will feature construction of 3D elements, so maybe the logo could be constructed in 3D as well. I began a crawl through Thingiverse, looking for the perfect skull model. I knew that a skull should still be the basis of the piece, but I had a few ideas other than just “crossed brushes” to bring it back to “art”.

And then wonky hotel WiFi stymied me for about an hour, but that was okay, I had some laundry to do.

When the WiFi came back, I went back to looking for the skull. This is what I found.

Elvis, a printable skull

That looked like a pretty good skull, and I knew that starting with a model that was good for printing probably meant that the geometry was solid enough to do a 3D rendering. I then goofed around in Blender until I got something that would serve as a good start for some more work in Photoshop.

Le Skull

To make the cross, I searched for some more images through DuckDuckGo, and found a suitable brush and screw driver. Over in Photoshop, with a few applications of the Posterize command, some Hue rotation, some Outlines and Drop Shadows, a little text, it was pretty much complete!

March 10th and 11th

Back-lit view of paper and foil micro-controller board

After visiting The Hacktory’s “Soft Circuit” event, PJ and I were inspired to take a stab at making some micro-controller circuits using alternative, “high/low tech” approaches.  PJ made an MCU circuit using conductive paint (has potential, but needs some tweaks).  I opted to try a circuit board using metal leaf.  That happened to work on the first shot — although careful scrutiny of the picture on the left suggests there was some luck involved (there are holes in the circuit that come dangerously close to wrecking it).

Looks good from this angle and all the connections check -- you'd never guess it was hanging by a thread ...

I had considered using scored foil as a way to make free-hand, one-off circuit boards for quite some time — but until recently, I never had the mix of free time and raw nerve to actually try it.  It turns out that my reservations were probably well-founded, but it also happens that the technique is workable, and the results are actually aesthetically interesting.

We decided to make the board in a hexagonal shape (Hive76 — hexagon — get it?). First, we prepped circuit board material by spraying adhesive on card-stock and then sticking the faux gold-leaf on the prepared surface (this sounds simple, but the foil is maddening stuff, so the process involved profanity and a certain amount of despair).  Then we cut the foiled card-stock into hexagons. After that, we cut out a rectangle where the IC was going to go, so that there were no conductive paths under the chip.  Once the board was roughly prepped, we made a “squashed bug” of the IC , splayed its pins out, and soldered it to the gilded surface.  Using the gaps between the pins as a guide for an exacto knife, we cut free-hand traces that routed the pins of the chip to large zones on the edge of the hexagon (I was a little surprised that the cuts were free of bridges). Finally, we soldered a capacitor between the MCU’s Vcc and ground and soldered a 47k resistor between Vcc and the MCU’s reset line.  At that point, we had a working circuit that was in-system programmable — at least in theory.

Unfortunately, I had no idea how we might program the MCU or hook it up to external circuitry without damaging the fragile structure.  PJ came up with the idea that made it all workable … magnets.  All really good magic is done with magnets.  The idea here was to place the paper computer on a steel surface, which allowed us to stick magnets wherever we wanted to make a connection.  With steel under the circuit, the down-force of the magnets gave us firm-but-gentle electrical contact with the delicate foil. Once the magnets were in place, we only needed to touch alligator clips to them — since the clips were steel, they stuck happily. With the clips secured to selected points on the MCU, we were free to connect the opposite ends of the clips to the various external items needed for the circuit.  Note the ingenious use of paper-clips.  PJ again — see a pattern here?

Our first connection was power (two magnet connections, one for +3.6 volts, the other for ground).  Then we hooked up the Spy-bi-wire programming interface (two wires, two more magnets).  After that, we wrote the obligatory “blink LED” program and loaded it into the paper computer.  Naturally, we wanted to see the results — two more connections for the LED terminals and — Voila!  Here’s the movie …