MSRaynsford

I've got a large pile of useless machines sat in the garage taking up space and I'd like to move them along so I've dropped the price and they're now on sale for £15 each (maker faire prices). http://msraynsford.myshopify.com/products/useless-machine

Hopefully many of you will be aware that Dominic and I run a UK laser importing business in the guise of JustAddSharks . We're making some massive improvements to the web store and the whole web site over the next few months and I'm trying to get some life back into that blog . We intend to be making a few announcements and featuring the work of our customers (and some of it is absolutely amazing) but we'd also like to feature work of other people. So if you have a hot tip for us on any laser cut item then we'd love to know about it. Let us know what you're working on and who else inspires you. Just send your emails to msraynsford+tips@gmail.com

So the parts for the first of 12 projects just arrived. This is probably the one that's furthest from my normal stuff, but it will bear relevance as we go through the year. I'm planning a serious build day next week where there will be unboxing and assembly photos and probably even some stop motion of the day. Fun times.

Now with annual postings . Christmas has happened so people are looking LARPward and gearing up for the new season, I've had 3 LRP related orders this week. The first are these dated rune tags, this is the first batch on my new laser and I was able to outline the etching to make it really stand out.

I saw this wonderful Moire Pattern  appear of several blogs last week and I just knew I had to put this technique into laser cutting. The original artist is Andrea Minini  and she has lots of amazing drawings all done in a similar style. For my version I manually traced the original image to create the vector artwork, each line is just a single low power cut and they are around 100 concentric rings. It was 8 hours of drawing but once the first one was cut it was all worth it. There has been some discussion since about making further patterns like this automagically, if anything comes from that I'll be sure to post the workflow up here.

I went to put our regular Christmas lights out and found that only half the LED's were lighting up so for a quick win I put up my 5m long strip of 300 neopixels instead. It instantly added colour and excitement but it rapidly turned into it's own project when I added a real time clock to turn the lights off at night.  I realised that by adding a different flash pattern each day I would have Advent Christmas lights. The system counts down to midnight and shows special animations for the occassion and it also turns the lights off permanently on the twelfth night The setup up is very simple, an Arduino nano is connected to a Real Time clock and a string of neopixels and driven from a 5V 4A power supply. The code is included below but in brief, each animation follows a series of rules Animations that are based on a single 'brightness' value so the patterns can be dimmed.  Animations are intended to be 'non blocking' so the arduino can be used fo...

I acquired 4 of these Sure 0832 dot matrix electronics boards recently. They were going spare from a project I worked on a long time ago (pre blog). Instead of leaving them in a box and forgetting about them I thought I should turn them straight back round into a new display that we can take along to Maker Faires. A simple laser cut frame holds all 4 displays in place, an arduino nano  drives the boards and controls the animation. I'm using Miles Burtons  arduino library to control the basic functions but I had to update it for the most recent version of the arduino IDE (1.5.8) so I've included that modified library in with the source files ( source here )