MSRaynsford

I recently purchased a couple of RGB addressable strips for play and potential future projects. While I had one handy though I thought I would make up a DIY ambilight system for our TV. Eli was also very interested so we actually turned it into an afternoon project while Hazel was napping. I drilled the holes in the board while Eli threaded them with cable ties, we then put the LED's in the right places.  I overkilled it with an Arduino Mega control board and a 5V 4A power supply also hung from the board. I used Prismatik  to drive the ambilight system. It was a fun way to spend the afternoon and the effect is pretty good but these LED's weren't bright/angled correctly enough so it's been taken down again already awaiting a V2, with a proper laser cut and angled frame.

The 3060 now has a new home, Ben came to collect it yesterday. Hopefully at some point he'll have a web presence of all the awesome things he's made with it and I'll be able to point you guys over to it. It fit nicely into the back of their vehicle. It's been a hectic week trying to get the machine ready to go as well as do a dozen other things. I don't have an 'after' photo but the before shot shows you just how much elbow grease was required to get that machine back to a clean state. Now the machine has gone it's left a rather big gap in the workshop but it's still going to be another 10 days before I get the new machine in there. We're taking it with us to EMF camp first. I'm quite excited now, I'll post about the new machine asap.

I saw these HyperQBS from Geobender.com and thought they were very cool so I decided to make one. A 3D model was made, flattened using Pepakura and Laser cut for quick assembly, then it was glued and taped to turn it into a hexaflexagon thingy, I even wrote an instructable about it if you'd like to make your own.

So I need to make some room for the next laser which means getting rid of the 3060 machine. It's served me relatively well and with the few improvements I've put on it the extraction works relatively well and you can see what you're cutting. So it'll be going for £2800 hopefully, it's listed on ebay but just contact me directly and we can discuss it.

Continuing the theme of breakages, the remade pumpkin box  exploded last week under the sheet growth of pumpkin within it. I could see the sides bending and meant to do something about it but I've been too busy, when I got back to it again the acrylic box had cracked and the pumpkin is making valid efforts to escape. At least it's a lot more cube shaped than last years efforts . 

There were a few damages after this weekend at the Imagineers Festival. The mitred icosahedron got dropped, that was just glued back together. The engagement ring box  had the hinge snapped a few events ago but somebody pulled all the remaining parts out of box for me. I only just realised that the prototype hinge I made for the large wooden box  would fit in the gap perfectly. A quick cut and shut later and I now have a working box again with a much sturdier lid.

I was recently commissioned to make a large version of my photo frame tree , and this was indeed significantly larger. This tree features 8x 6"x4" photo frames and 1x 12"x8" photo frame The backing tree was 9mm thick and cut on the large laser cutter at Nottingham Hackspace  (I can't wait till my new big laser arrives, currently docking in Felixstowe).  The individual leaves were made from 1.5mm thick walnut. The custom engraving on the trunk features the customers initials and the date they met, the frame was made for their 5th (wooden) wedding anniversary The whole tree measures 900m tall and 1000mm wide, which makes it the largest thing I've ever posted and boy didn't the post office love me that day.