Something Unreal

It actually works! Well, its first ever print-out could certainly do with some improvements, but to be honest, I’m happy it’s even intelligible at all! Part 7 in my super-basic, Arduino-controlled printer project.

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It should be better when I at least have a stable and level tray for the paper (or whatever) to sit on. I have an idea for an alternative to a heavy sheet of steel, which you should be able to see in the next video. Perhaps the PSU fan will have arrived by then, too… <_<

Also, enjoy the in-sync 50 FPS if you can! That pen flicks back and forth at stupid speeds, so a high frame rate is actually useful here.

Time for some real progress this time! The sixth part in this series where I make a super-basic printer with an Arduino.

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It’s pretty much ready to print – just a little hot glue and a sheet of paper and it’s all set! But unfortunately, this video is already ~8 minutes long, so that’ll have to wait.

After trying out solenoids and ruling out floppy drive motors because of speed, I looked at servos as a way of moving the pen up and down. I settled on Hitec’s second-fastest micro servo, which is digital (means it’s not limited to 50 Hz update intervals) and has metal gears (means it won’t destroy itself quickly). It’s designed for use in R/C helicopters, so I’m hoping this will handle the fast motions over a small range of travel, with a light load, well. I’m certainly impressed by it so far.

The most boring video in this series of me making a super-basic, Arduino-controlled printer. I made it at 50 FPS to try to make it more interesting to people who can play that, but that ended up making it out-of-sync at times. *Sigh*

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This is what happens when I don’t plan everything through before I start making something (i.e. all the time). Sorry. Stuff will actually happen in the next one, I promise!

Part four in this series of “making of” videos where I make a super-basic printer controlled by an Arduino.

There’s still no pen, so I stuck an LED where the pen will go and made it turn on when the pen should be drawing, as a test. Then, I took a long-exposure photo while it “printed” with the LED, pointing the camera upwards slightly after it finished each row. What I ended up with was a photo of the image that it tried to print, with inverted colours and stretched a bit because I didn’t move the camera at the right speed.

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It can also now print bidirectionally, and it’s much faster to receive the data for the next row of pixels, because they’re no longer sent one at a time.

Illustrations are by とんぐ (Tongu) and CAFFEIN (blog / Pixiv).

Part three in this series of “making of” videos where I make a super-basic printer controlled by an Arduino.

Although it still doesn’t look like a printer, I’ve been working on the software. Here, you can see the first stages of having the printer be controlled by the computer. The image data is actually being sent, but very slowly (think of it as a “compatibility mode”) – I wanted to make sure I had two-way communication working perfectly before making things faster. As such, there are still debugging messages being displayed on the Arduino’s LCD, too, left over from me trying to get things to work.

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The next stage will be to prove that the Arduino is really receiving the image data correctly, even though there’s no mechanism to move a pen yet!

Illustration is by CAFFEIN (blog / Pixiv).

P.S. This video editor is bloody awful.

Part two in this series of “making of” videos where I make a super-basic printer controlled by an Arduino.

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Sorry for being really lazy about uploading this. Also, the upload itself finished a little quicker than I thought it would, so yay, the date at the end is in the future.

A look at how the clumsy autonomous robot was made, and her very first versions, when she was worse than clumsy, before she was even slightly clever. There’s more to show, but it was already approaching my longest ever video, so I decided to end it here.

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A later version can be seen here. She’s progressed a little further still, now – I should upload a video of her outside soon!

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com):

• “The Way Out”
• “Dance Monster”

The first in a series of “making of” videos where I make a super-basic printer controlled by an Arduino! I recorded pretty much every step of the way, so you should hopefully be able to follow the progress from pretty much nothing (here) to something that actually works.

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I started this project almost a year ago, but I’m only uploading the videos now that I’m sure it actually gets somewhere and that I didn’t just abandon it like I do with most of my projects.

The rest of the videos probably won’t feature so much editing work – I just needed to do that in this video due to my explanations that would be too hard to follow if I just kept my speech and video of my hand moving enthusiastically in front of the camera.

I should’ve made a compilation of every time I said “Basically” at the end, basically.

A new soundcase will be making its way to London MCM Expo in May 2010! Here you can see the making of it, and the old one being used in October 2009. It seemed to go down so well that I just had to do it again, and not a last-minute job, this time. ;)

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The soundcase is basically music on wheels. Except that this time, you can also sing karaoke on it, and there are lights (although you probably won’t be able to see them much during the day, unfortunately… wish I’d made it last October, when it gets dark early :/ ).

Also, yes, I haven’t put any pictures on the suitcase yet (in this video), but I couldn’t really leave it until much closer to MCM before uploading the video.

After 4 months of not even touching this video, I realised I was never going to get it finished due to a massive lack of motivation. However, it is at least complete enough to cover the details of the circuits used in my Custom StepMania Lights, which you can then build into any cabinet you like, which I suppose is what most people who asked me for a tutorial actually wanted.

Please Watch in HD to be able to see more in the detailed images. Sorry in advance for the sucky quality of the photos though – I didn’t have my HD camcorder when I started making this video, so I just used my PSP’s camera.

My lights are designed to work with my own freely-downloadable program “StepMania Player”, which you can get here. As well as playing simfiles by itself, my program can also be used to control the lights while you play StepMania, each light being triggered by your keypresses in-game.

When configured correctly, StepMania version “3.9 Plus” can also control the lights directly. However, as you see in the video, it flashes all 4 bulb together, not separately. In the video, the leftmost bulb doesn’t light up because a motor is connected inside the box, in place of the bulb (I like messing around).

I hope this is at least of some use to someone. Sorry that I never finished it, but I’m releasing it now having started working on it over a year ago, which is just ridiculous considering how little material there actually is in it.