Unless you have been living under a rock(in which case you won’t be reading this), you know that this past week has been very strange with the losses of 4 Celebrities. Ed McMahon known for star search and the tonight show, Farrah Fawcett for her work as an actress and model, Michael Jackson for numerous Pop Music hits and of course Billy Mays the ultimate Pitchman. While each of these people brought a different element of entertainment and contributions to the world I make the argument that the significance of the loss of Billy Mays is by far the worst.

In today’s society it is common place for us to put actors, musicians and sports stars in the spotlight, it is because culture likes to be entertained. While I am not bashing or saying that we don’t need entertainment we create such an importance on it due to the fact that we want to be distracted from our own lives. Many people get sucked into entertainment that they forget to live, watching endless sports games and movies; And while I indulge in this quite a bit, we as a culture should be focusing on the more important things in life.

People like Billy Mays and his “Pitchmen” counterpart Anthony Sullivan and their related direct response companies are one of the best encouragements to American society. I say this because many if not most of those products are the result of an individual entrepreneurs invention or efforts, just take a look at one list of products http://www.asseenontv.com/ . One of the driving forces which put the USA on top of the tech is our innovative products and inventive people. These days when people are concerned with the economy, shipping jobs overseas, and many issues to numerous to mention, we need to be encouraging people to go into their garages and workshops and try to invent something. While I don’t mean to downplay Billy’s personal life he stood as a public spokes person in an industry which promotes and celebrates innovation and invention. The American dream of coming up with an idea and bringing it to market in hopes of making money from your brain child is something I believe lives deep down within each one of us.

As someone who works for a big company that does product development I have become aware of how hard it is to bring something to market, and can further appreciate how much of enablers Mays and the direct response industry is. While there are many different programs which encourage the same ideals loosing a public figure can hurt this effort. I hope that people keep inventing and keep pushing themselves so that we as a country can stay prominent. I for one have lots of ideas which I would love to see products and I am sorry that Billy Mays can’t be my pitchman, but am hopeful that when I am ready there will be people who can help the little guy, like myself.

Filed under: Personal, ASSEENONTV, Billy, Billy Mays, invention, Mays, Product, RIP | Post a comment

As most people who were exposed to my twitter posts last weekend know that I was at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. The festival itself was a blast and in addition to taking in some great music and taking some photos of the event I got the chance to bring my gigapan out to play. The gigapan is a tool which take many photos using a robotic camera base, then uses software to create super high resolution images  by joining all the photos together.  I took 5 gigapans over the weekend and while I am still stitching them together and doing correction, this is a good example.  This one was taken on the WHAT stage from the comfort of my vip seating hill when Galactic is on stage.  It has some washout which I am working on but it still is good to get a feel for the show.

you can click here  to see the full gigapan in a larger view

Filed under: Personal, bonnaroo, gigapan, music, photos, TN | 1 Comment

I made one of the first steps to turning a project from an idea to a reality this morning; making the first financial contribution to the project. While many times I have ideas for things I would like to do, I am careful about only investing in projects which I am GOING to do.  That milestone of my CNC router project happened when I purchased bearings for the machine.

I have been mulling over ideas on how to design this cnc. Mainly I have found 3 design plan sets which seem common online yet none of them meet my needs. Since I am incredibly picky about this sort of thing I figure the best thing to do is to take bits and pieces from different places and make something which is uniquely mine.

Joe’s CNC ( http://www.joescnc.com ) – He has 2 different designs. The first one was made in 2006 and is one of the standards that you see people on cnc forums talking about. His plans are free and it seems like a solid unit. The issue I have with it is that it is a full wrap carriage; meaning that the gantry travels under the work surface. This is bad for a number of reasons but mainly I got a super table to mount this on, namely the new Biesemeyer Extension table for the unisaw ( I wonder how I got that ) and that would prevent this design from going forward.  The second design from Joe is much better but I refuse to pay 100 bucks just for the plans for something I can design myself, I am not really into just building

The next set of plans is the JGRO Plans Like Joe’s plans it offers simple construction methods with MDF and some of the same features. If I was a betting man (which I am) i would say that one of these 2 sets of plans inspired the other. Full plans are available for this one for free, but I really dislike the way that he does linear motion. There is no way I can tell to hold reasonable accuracy with out really spending time tweaking the unit after assembly, something that I know is likely no matter which way I go.

The last type is from the site www.buildyourcnc.com  he has 2 different designs and the one I am going to make  most closely resembles his new machine the black toe while I don’t understand the name I really like the way his linear guides are done.

So the project starts, I purchased these v-bearings for a cheap price of 2.50 each and as I continue to spec my machine I will buy the parts which will help me create more cool projects in the future.

Filed under: Technical, cnc, Bearings, cnc, Delta, Project, robotics, Router, Unisaw, Woodworking | Post a comment

As I mentioned one of my projects this summer is to convert an electric lawnmower to a robot.  Not only does this project appeal to me because of my laziness and not wanting to mow my own lawn but it allows for the creation of a platform which I can use for future developments.  I started to dig into this project a bit over the past week and now have 2 different directions which I am considering.

1)  A simple mechanical drive where I power the rear wheels and have casters on the front. This use of differential steering will be sufficient for my needs, but it doesn’t have that flare which makes a project stand out. On the other hand doing something simple (KISS FTW) may take the time required to finish the project more achievable.

2) My next thought is a mechanically more sophisticated system of using mecanum wheels on the robot.  Mecanum wheels are ones that allow for holonomic movement(movement in any direction) You can read more about them here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecanum_wheel   One of issues with mecanum wheels is that they need to ensure contact with the ground at all time to work, which is why they are traditionally used in systems which roll on flat floors such as forktrucks. In the uneven ground of a yard or offroad the robot would require a suspension system, which is where the complexity begins.  Normally suspensions are straight forward because their only requirement is to keep traction and keeping close to the ground is not a factor like it is when mowing the lawn.  In the research I have done so far I have yet to find any off-road mecanum robots, in fact the closest I found is a concept for a mars surface vehicle. If I do go this route I plan on using the mecanum wheels from Andymark, as they offer 6inch,  8inch, and 10inch options with different modular hubs, which will make the challenge the implementation of the system not re-inventing the wheel.

This is the first paint style sketch of what I am thinking about if I decide to go down the mecanum path. Obviously the largest challenge is to keep the blade at a constant height so that I still have a good cut quality in addition to a autonomous robot cutting it.

Filed under: Technical, lawnmower | 2 Comments

I found the source code online and fixed it a bit so you can see the icon but now you can just put this file in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins  and then you can search mcmaster from the search field in firefox. If you are like me an use Mcmaster-Carr daily this will really come in handy.      download the xml file here (right click save as)

Filed under: Uncategorized | Post a comment