Making – jesser

October 8, 2017October 7, 2017

Disney Shirts

We’re headed back to WDW pretty soon, this time with Matt’s whole side of the family. I am not a big fan of the matchy-matchy family shirts, but I do like to do a little something special for a Mickey trip. So I came up with the idea of making a “custom” Mickey head for each person. I drew a ton of designs in Illustrator, drawing inspiration from all over the web – except Darth Mickey – he was cribbed directly from the web. Then circulated then let everyone have their choice.

They got printed on some t’shirt transfer paper, ironed on and voila. I’m excited to see everyone in their shirts!

June 14, 2016

A Maker Kind of Weekend

It was a good weekend. Mostly they are.

The highlight of the weekend was Denver’s Mini Maker Faire. It’s quite a bit different (smaller) than the main Maker Faire in Bay Area, but it was fun! And cheap ($20 for us all!). And we got to do some cool stuff. Like make little cars (above).

And try out weaving …

And make light up pins …

And show off my McGyver for president shirt (it was a hit).

We were there for over 4 hours and luckily it was a mostly indoor event, because it was HOT! HOT HOT! Summer is here.

Afterward, we had naps (Matt and I) and then sent the kids off to the community center so we could have a date night. Ahhhhhhh Grown Up Time. I’m a fan.

In other weekend news:

We had people over on Friday (jerk chicken cook off, natch)
Tabby got to kitty-sit (OH JOY!) and had a playdate.
We finished off two more benches (except a little sanding and some sealing)
Ben got his own playdate and some quality time on his skate board.
We had (different) people over on Sunday for burgers.

Yes, no complaints. I do love me some summer.

June 10, 2016

Raingutter Regatta

Being as that I am a girl with no brothers, I have little experience with the boy side of scouting. Which is actually part of what makes Ben’s Boy Scout events so much fun. It’s lots of new stuff.

For the uninitiated, like myself, the Raingutter Regatta is the maritime equivalent of the Pinewood Derby. You build a boat, paint it, make it a sail and race it in rain gutters against your fellow scouts.

We (of course) discovered that this event was sooner than we’d thought on Monday right after Matt left for a business trip (that wouldn’t have him home until today), so I got tasked with turning the rectangular wooden piece and dowel we were given into y’know … boats.

Fortunately, I have been paying attention during shop time. And I was able to complete the task with little fanfare.

The kids painted them and off we went.

Ben competed against fellow Wolf Scouts and Tabby was in the “family” (mostly sisters) bracket.

It was a double elimination tournament (I learned how those work yesterday), and both kids won their first 2 races and lost their third.

Which netted them 3rd place in each of their brackets!

Not too shabby for our first go. More importantly, they had a great time!

July 31, 2012

Up!

Last Tuesday was L-day … as in Launch Day. The kids had been looking forward to this for quite some time. It was the day we would set off the air rocket they built with daddy.

The concept of an air rocket is pretty simple. Rather than having some sort of slow burning onboard fuel, an air rocket is all the initial thrust. You use a cylinder to capture air at high pressure. The pressure comes from a standard bicycle pump. You then release the pressure suddenly, expelling the air straight up and into a rocket made with paper and reinforced with painter’s tape. NASA has a good description of some of the physics.

Continue reading “Up!”

May 30, 2012May 30, 2012

PVC Pipe, Physics and Flying Marshmallows

This weekend we not only gave the kids guns … we made them for them. While at Maker Faire, Matt and I succumbed to the pretty displays and bright lights and allowed Tabby to bring home a Marshmallow Shooter kit. I had no ethical qualms about this you understand – just financial qualms over paying $20 for a few bits of PVC. But it was a neat souvenir and since we got home she’d been begging to build them.

So when we knew we’d be at our friends’ house all evening on Saturday I grabbed a bag of mini marshmallows at the store and we brought the kit with us. This is a ridiculously easy kit to put together. You just snap together a few pieces of PVC and err … that’s it. You load a mini mallow into the mouthpiece of the shooter and puff some air in and it zooms off at an impressive speed. As they’re marshmallows, the projectile doesn’t really hurt anyone. The dads got into it big at the BBQ and kept shooting the kids who would then look down for the marshmallow and eat it.There also may or may not have been a shootout at our house between my sister, Matt and myself after the kids went to bed and everyone else had gone home on Sunday night. I’m not at liberty to say.

If you want to build your own marshmallow shooter, and I recommend you do because they’re all kinds of fun, here’s an instructable to show you how to do it. Though even that isn’t really necessary. You take 1/2″ PVC pipe and connect it with Ts and elbows and such until you have the configuration you want. You have to have only two open pipe ends one for blowing air into and one for the marshmallow to exit and you can do just about whatever configuration you want and see what works best. Don’t glue the PVC – not only is it unnecessary but PVC glue is pretty toxic and definitely something you want to avoid if you can!

May 23, 2012May 24, 2012

San Fran Days 2 and 3 – Maker Faire

Before I get down to telling you all about Maker Faire, another reminder to enter The Giveaway to Uncommon Goods for $50 towards any of the great things they have to offer.

Now now now, on to Maker Faire. The fair organizers, Make Magazine, bill it as The Greatest Show and Tell on Earth. And that’s a pretty good description. Everywhere you look you see AMAZING things that people have built.

This incredible invention, The Ragtime Castaway Band, welcomed everyone to the fair (did I mention we were there at opening both mornings, waiting on the countdown? yea. we were) with its music. It is a robotic band contained in a hut. All the instruments you see above hang form the ceiling of the hut. There are a few other instruments surrounding the edges on the ground. They are all controlled robotically and they play some really fine music. Just in case you were wondering, the first tune of the morning was the Original Star Trek Theme. Very appropriately nerdy. Continue reading “San Fran Days 2 and 3 – Maker Faire”

March 20, 2012March 19, 2012

The Robot Mouse

One of Tabby’s most favorite gifts from her birthday was the robot mouse Matt got for her, or rather the robot mouse KIT. It had to be built, soldered together. One night after Ben had gone to bed and I was otherwise occupied, Matt and Tabby built this little guy together. As she has excellent fine motor skills, she held the solder while Matt held the iron. I wish I had seen (and been able to take photos!) of them working together, but I’m glad they had their special time together.

The cool thing is that when it’s done, it chases the brightest light in the room. It works best in relative darkness, but you can use a flashlight to lead it around the room. It is fun to play with and both kids are getting a big kick out of it.

April 21, 2011May 26, 2011

Egg Bot – it’s Eggcellent!

Alright, that’s the end of my egg puns, swear. Sorry ’bout that.

So Tuesday night Matt finally cracked open his Egg Bot and assembled it. According to him it was a pretty easy, straight-forward assembly. No soldering or any of that variety of monkey business, just some screws here and there. You hook it up to your computer and install some software (drivers for the bot itself and then Inkscape, a relatively nice open-sourced vector graphics program for the data to send to the egg-bot). All told, he got it up and drawing in under 90 minutes.

The drawing process is pretty simple. You make vector drawings, each color separated into layers. You then tell the bot to print this layer or that layer. You can swap out pens and get your different colors. The one thing that makes it complicated is that you can’t just “fill” an image. You have to hatch it (draw lots of little lines) for fill, but the bot comes with some good extensions for Inkscape that greatly simplify the process.

The single real “issue” we ran into was with one of the motors. The pen kept falling off the end of the egg and he motor didn’t seem to have the power to bring it back up. It was also making jerky movements and made the first drawings look pretty sloppy. Some online searching netted the answer … we had to increase the voltage to the step motor by adjusting a potentiometer (all that sounds hard, but it just requires a small turn of a screw-driver). Instantly, we had smooth strong drawing.

So instead of cleaning the house last night, we played with the Egg Bot. We made our own designs, simple lines, etc. and downloaded a couple from Thingaverse. It was pretty magical to see the bot do its thing. Tabby was particularly fascinated by it … Ben mostly tried to grab at it.

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Of course it is not without its drawbacks. Matt is claiming that this is his “gateway robot.” Now he wants to build a Maker Bot, a 3-D printer. Pricetag $2K. Yikes.

June 29, 2010May 31, 2011

Treadputer?

Last night my darling hubby installed his latest project on our treadmill. At my request, he built me a laptop holder for our treadmill, based on some instructions from somewhere on the web (don’t remember where now and we didn’t really follow them anyhow,so I won’t bother to find them). It’s made of PVC pipe (3/4″, I believe) and tied on with bungee cords. Certainly not the most elegant or beautiful solution, but it’s secure, it came together quickly and it was CHEAP! Sucker probably cost less than $10.

So now you’re probably envisioning me playing Sims while jogging along at a good clip. WRONG! I plan to use this for a couple of things: 1. To watch stuff on the web while I run (TV shows, etc. from Hulu or whatever) or 2. To do light web browsing (google reader, Facebook) while I walk slooowly. I tried it out a bit last night and it will take some practice. I also think I might want a little arm extension on the right for a mouse platform … I am terrible with the trackpad.

Now we just need to do something about the name. Treadputer doesn’t really roll off the tongue. Lapmill? Treadtop? Walkstation?