Three more things in my house require a remote control now, and one of them is the streetlight in front of my house. Ever since I heard about a hacked streetlight at the Guerrilla Drive in for Back to the Future in 2009, I have been turning off the streetlight on Darien Street by carefully aiming a laser dot at the light sensor on top of the streetlight. The light sensors on most streetlights face west to catch the last photons from the fading sunset before illuminating for the night—and this one faces right into the third floor of my house. It is very important to me to be able to choose to sit in the cozy dark, save my city some money, and not contribute to light pollution for a minute.
Just recently I revamped the process with a new, permanent laser and remote control system. Here it is in action:
I’ll show you how …
Continue reading “Civic infrastructure hacking: laser-controlled streetlight.”
Illustrator to OpenSCAD to 3D printing
For Philly Tech Week, I will be showing visitors how to take a shape from Adobe Illustrator into the popular open source CAD program OpenSCAD and make a 3D model suitable for 3D printing.
I’m sure you know Illustrator. It’s the most successful vector drawing program <clarkson>in the world.</clarkson> OpenSCAD is less well known. It is best described as coding for objects. You make a solid with the function cube() and cut a cylinder() out of it with the difference() function, etc. But sometimes you want a more organic or complicated shape to start with. That’s where artist JK Keller stepped in and made a script that automates some of the process for you. What you need for this workshop:
- Laptop
- Adobe Illustrator
- OpenSCAD
- This script: https://github.com/jk-keller/Adobe-Scripts
- Some designs or ideas
There may not be time to print everyone’s design, but you should go home with something 3D printed.
Monday 4/22 5pm – 10
Gratis and Libre (free)
Hive76, suite 519915 Spring Garden St Philadelphia PA 19123
RSVP by commenting below.