Now you can purchase wonderful Hobgob products with Bitcoins, the experimental peer-to-peer digital currency.
Just send a message to btc AT hobgobeclectronics DOT com and I’ll reply with a price and my receiving address.
Digital currency! It’s like we’re in the FUTURE.
Here’s a nice documentary about Site 3, made by our intern from Ryerson’s New Media program, Michelle.
I’ll be talking about and demonstrating my BeatSneaks at the Royal Ontario Museum’s Institute for Contemporary Culture next week as a part of their Digital Artist Show and Tell series. You should come! You’ll get to try on a pair and make some music with your feet. I’ll be showing off the original BeatSneaks as well as two newer, wireless designs (like this), and talking about the build process as well as how my work fits into the tech-art world in general. This is happening while the gallery is running its new Fresh Flowers exhibit featuring the iPad paintings of David Hockney.
Here’s a link to the event page from the ROM.
November 11 at 7:00PM. Save the date!
Continuing with my apparent quest to fill my new apartment entirely with furniture of my own making, here’s a coffee table that I just put together. I can’t say the idea was entirely mine, though. In fact, it was entirely Craft Magazine’s.
All’s you do is take an old typesetter’s drawer (which can be found in almost any junk shop), attach some legs to it, and plop a piece of glass on top. (Relatively) instant coffee table. You can fill it with knick knacks AND paddywhacks.
Glass can be had from any glass and mirror shop. Just give them the measurements of the drawer and they’ll cut out a piece for you. If you’re concerned that your drawer isn’t totally square, trace out its outline and give that to them instead. Get a piece that’s at least 1/4″ thick, since the tabletop will have to be able to support whatever’s on top of it and survive minor impacts without shattering.
In the Craft video, they weld the table legs together out of square tube steel, which looks great, but I don’t have easy access to a space to weld in (we can’t yet weld at Site 3 because of insurance restrictions) and so opted for pipes and flanges as legs instead. The cool thing about using pipes and flanges is that, since they’re threaded, each leg’s height can be adjusted to account for an uneven floor.
The bottom of the typesetter’s drawer is made out of fairly thin MDF. I didn’t want to have to put screws or bolts through that material to attach the flanges and have them poking through to the top side, so I attached a layer of 1/2″ plywood to the bottom with wood glue and brad nails. The dividers separating the three main compartments of the drawer are wide enough to sink nails into and solidly fasten the plywood to the drawer while the glue sets.
Also, the steel pipes that I bought came with these orange plastic covers on either end to protect the threads from damage. These conveniently also protect everything else (i.e. the floor) from the threads. The bright orange might offend some people, I suppose, but I like it.
So I just moved into a new place with a sweet deck and decided very quickly that we were going to need something to hang out around and eat on.
Having seen this picnic table design, I built something that looks similar, but incorporates a few modifications. First off, I didn’t use cedar, because that stuff is expensive. Pretty, but expensive. I chose instead to use plain old spruce – non-pressure-treated – since it was cheap and with a good seal should last long enough in wet weather.
I wanted there to be plenty of legroom underneath the table, so I chose not to use the typical diagonal support beams that most picnic tables have. To make sure it would be stable, I used 2x6s for the entire thing. You could get away with thinner lumber for the tabletop, of course, but no matter. Using the 2x6s makes everything very sturdy, if also very heavy. There are no supports other than the legs in this table, and yet there is very little wobble. All it takes is some big pieces of wood, a few well-tightened 3/4″ bolts, and a generous distribution of deck screws.
The mitred border is held together with deck screws and wood glue. Two 3″ screws in recessed holes pull the joint together and the glue provides some additional strength. The screw holes are filled in with dowels to conceal them.
I bought enough wood to make matching benches out of 2x4s, but as we already have some perfectly good wooden folding chairs out there, those can wait. In fact, folding chairs are a little more versatile and a lot less unwieldy than benches, so they may just never get built.
Here’s the Sketchup model, if you’d like to take a closer look: picnictable.skp
Materials and Measurements
Videos of people making things are the best!
Join me once again at Site 3 on August 24th for another circuit prototyping class.
It will be just like this, but much less scary!
From the event description:
“Interested in learning to build electronic circuits, but don’t know where to start? This is the course for you! In this introductory-level course you’ll learn how to read a schematic and how to use it to build a working prototype. During the course you’ll build the Atari Punk Console, a circuit that produces sounds reminiscent of retro video games. We’ll also discuss some basic theory of how the circuit works, and we’ll do some basic “circuit bending” by tinkering with the design and see how our changes affect the circuit’s behaviour.”
Site 3 just got a two-axis three-axis, full-size, CNC mill! Oooooh:
This in addition to our trio of lathes and table-top manual mill that we got just a few weeks ago:
Tools are great!
3D printing (sintering) with the power of the sun!
On May 27 I will be teaching an Introduction to Circuit Prototyping class at Site 3!
The class will show you how to follow a schematic, prototype an electronic circuit on a breadboard, test it, and then play with it. For our circuit we will be using the Atari Punk Console, which is a fun noise-making circuit that sounds like something out of an old 8-bit video game.
It more or less does this:
If you’ve ever been interested in building your own electronic circuits and need a little help getting your feet wet, then this class is perfect for you.
So go ahead, buy a ticket, come on down and learn!
