Newcastle Maker Faire 2014

-

Newcastle Maker Faire 2014, was my first maker faire of the year. Being the UK Maker Faire it always has a pretty good turnout and this is my fourth year in attendance. This year I went under the guise of Just Add Sharks, our company that sells laser cutters. We took along a Blacknose laser cutter set up to run the Etch a Sketch laser cutter so that people could see it for real and have a play with it.

We were incredibly well received by the community. A number of other makers loved being able to see the machine in person and we definitely picked up a few sales from the weekend. We even got a favourable mention on the Make blog, (although I always feel like I jumble my words when presented with any form of recording device).

More importantly than that we got to meet a whole bunch of regular friends and make some new ones. Newcastle locals were surprised to hear how far we had come since last year. Guys like Alan Mahon made the trip all the way from Ireland again just to be a visitor, and Sarah (@Chixors) and Ruth (@OMGoshShop) came out as MSRaynsford fans. It's wonderful to know people still find the site inspiring, I promise to make more of an effort to keep it updating with simple things (and svgs) like it used to be.


Popular posts from this blog

Wiring the Ruida Controller

-
Image
The RDC6442G controller from Ruida This is going to be quite an image heavy post describing the rewiring needed to convert between the Leetro controller and the Ruida controller. It is also pretty straight forward on the old Just Add Sharks laser cutters because all of the wires are clearly labelled. The controller was prepared in the previous step in order to make this conversion process as smooth as possible. The Leetro (Pad03) panel on the left and the Ruida panel on the right The view from inside the laser looking up at the control panel The control panel is an easy place to start, both panels have just a single cable that runs down to the controller, both panels are a very similar size, with the Ruida panel being slightly smaller underneath so it will fit in the hole left behind easily. The Pad03 panel clips into place so you'll need to reach up inside the machine to work the clips loose. The cable runs down the inside of the laser and is cable tied onto mounti...
Read more

Laser Cut Cryptex

-
Image
This is my laser cut cryptex. It features 28 different characters and 9 rings, giving a total possible 10.5 Trillion different combinations. I took a bit of time developing the design so that I could add some nice features. This cryptex file is laid out so that you can have any number of rings in your own design. The best feature is that the codeword is changeable, each locking ring has an outer letter ring that can be placed in any one of the 28 different positions. Once the rings are back in place the ring locking bars can added and they prevent the rings from being modified until the box is open again. It's a bit hard to explain so I made a video showing how it all work ( svg here ) It took a long time to assemble this so I lived with my initial design choices but if I were to remake it I would adjust the file to make the ring locking bars out of 6mm ply and maybe put some blind holes onto the code rings to prevent the code being brute forced.
Read more

Rainbow Puzzle Box

-
Image
This is a binary sequence puzzle box built from 3mm birch plywood, it uses a Gray code pattern to ultimately align all the dials into a rainbow pattern before the lid can be removed. It's actually a redesign of a puzzle inside Loki's box of Tricks  because I thought it would make a cool stand alone puzzle box. The files are available for sale in my Etsy store . ( svg here ) The puzzle consists of five interlocking disks that can only rotate when the disks either side of it are in the correct position to allow it. The large wheel in the middle and the disks on the underside of the lid further restrict the rotation of the disks. The large wheel must be pointed to the disk that is being rotated and the large wheel is in turn restricted from pointing to the smaller disks depending on alignment. Once all the disks are aligned into the full rainbow the large wheel is completely free to rotate and can be turned to the edge of the box and allows the lid to be removed. There is a very ...
Read more