Tracy and Mary Sigler of Heavy Duty Inc have made these really cool jackpot pillows using digital fabric printing technology. Fabric printing is a great (and unconventional) use for micRo and RoGR. I know BC has some nozzle ideas… we may end up offering a specialized tool for this type of printing.

Jackpot Pillows by Heavy Duty Inc

They are having a free give-away for 4 lucky winners. Check it out.

Hi everyone! Sure is quiet around here…must have something to do with the elections, ya think?

Now, most of you know that I don’t allow political and religious discussion on the site, and this post is no exception. Instead, this is a little demo designed for a some fun during an historic election. Yesterday at the grocery I saw these big slabs of both brown and white chocolate. I thought I’d get one of each and use the RoGR carve McCain and Obama on the white and brown blocks respectively!  I used the venerable EMC2 and Image to Gcode to create the depthmaps from a couple of pix I pulled off the Goog.

I want an excuse to practice since I am considering making carvings of my family and friends on chocolate to hand out as Season’s Greetings. Aside from the political significance, I find this little project to be historically unique; maybe the world’s first CNC machined chocolate?

So…I wouldn’t call the experiment a resounding success. Then again, I don’t have all the time in the world to be goofing around with chocolate! Basically the amount of relief I’m looking for needs real 3d. The problem with a depthmap from grayscale is that it can’t really make 3d. Things like eyebrows become sunk in the head, as they are darker than the surrounding, and the program just equates dark with depth. Still, I think Obama came out ok considering what little work I did on him…

For reasons unknown to me, McCain came out looking a little “rough”..

Man, what a mess! We ate a lot of the “waste”.

Next was the “torch test” or trial by fire….who will melt first? I think this is an accurate picture of what we see at the polls today!

Well, I think this picture says it all…the chocolate oracle has spoken!

Cheers!
~Grayson

A few videos for your amusement:

Economic tumult, political upheaval, uncertainty? Great, everything is going as expected.

What?

Yes, it’s hard to believe, but the human species is evolving rapidly; our current economic paroxysm simply reflects the pangs of a new birth. Throughout history, economies have plunged into turmoil just prior to the greatest economic boom-times, and November 2008 is no exception. Drastic changes are taking place certainly, but we’ve nothing to fear as these changes presage the greatest time in all of human history; a time when the human potential will seem to unfold at a near infinite rate. Science and technology will again take the front stage of this new human renaissance, with a few key technologies at the heart of this boom, among them:

AI, Genetics, Robotics.

These technologies will develop as astonishing speeds over the coming years, similar to but faster than the development of the personal computer, the internet, mobile telephony and the various other technologies of the last boom cycle. The uncertainty that we are experiencing now is required, as we must restructure ourselves, our markets and our leaders to facilitate our evolution: in the lexicon of a “punctuated equilibrium“, we are currently punctuating.

So then what is this “New World Order”? Well, if the truth shall set you free, then these nascent technologies are our truth. The “New World Order” is made of us; a newer stronger us, a society of supermen.

Huh?

Yes it is true. AI will be in operation within this decade. When a computer masters thought, the computer will begin solving humanities’ largest problems at phenomenal speed. The computer will quickly surpass human questions and begin pondering questions humans could not, including notions such as how to keep man safe from computers (easy, integration). Within just a few decades, humans will amplify our knowledge by a billion times, and with this knowledge we will solve our problems, (and certainly make some new ones). This is not my concern though, and neither is genetics, but a little on that…

When DNA was discovered, some of the world’s best minds confidently predicted that it would take humans 10,000 years to decrypt the genome; it took 27. Heck the whole DNA code can fit on CD, but who could have predicted the meteoric rise of computers? (a nearly “instant” technology that has done more for humanity than any technology in the last million years…) Now that we have the genome in hand, we possess our own destiny. Expect to see “miracles” being performed in just the next decade, as we rush toward understanding our inner makings. I digress; but for more transhuman predictions I’d recommend a read of Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near.

Robots at the gates of dawn:

Robots…what are they? Walking talking autonomous servants? Not yet, and I doubt such a machine will ever be in wide use. (Besides, bipedalism is a bad design for most jobs; we’ve long had better ideas for locomotion.) So what kind of robot then? Well, if you use a computer printer, you’ve used a robot.

A printer?

Yep. A printer is a gantry robot, driven by a machine controller (computer) and fed spacial coordinate data as well as parametric values for its purpose-built functions from numerous software programs. Got all that? My point is, you almost certainly have a printer sitting beside you now, and you know how to use it. You are a roboticist, but I doubt you ever think of yourself that way. This shows how a technology doesn’t need “bottom up” understanding to achieve ubiquity; users only need a “top down” knowledge to use the machine…heck, a user doesn’t even have to know they are using a robot to use it.

The computer printer is a good example too, since it is a foot in the door to my contention; that behind that door is a veritable tsunami of automation technology that is ripe for consumption. I am not speaking of how robots will affect science and industry, but rather the personal robotics revolution that puts the power into your hands, my hands, school kids; all of us. What is this power? It is the power to make practically anything.

Consider that any tool held by man’s hand (and many that can not) can be used by this robot to much greater effect, precision and speed; without risk, and at a tiny fraction of the cost of human labor. Every person will have an affordable, autonomous manufacturing plant at their disposal. This single tool will replace practically every other tool in use. The cultural uptake of this technology on a personal level is what I deem the Micro-Manufacturing Economy; a DIY economy far more supportive of individual empowerment; a milieu of high-personalization and individual creativity, of collaborative manufacturing and unprecedented cultural advancements, in both art and science.

This is my vision, and I have no doubt that this is now coming to pass; the development of the personal robot:  A machine that is adaptable, rugged and inexpensive. A machine that is modular and configurable. A machine that is….to be continued…

Grayson Sigler (aka Brainchild)

I figured not much could be scarier than my own face on a Halloween pumpkin, so I set out to carve my face on a pumpkin using Lumenlab’s DIY RoGR Robot kit.

The first issue was to get a head shot. They say beauty and brains don’t go together; they were wrong twice!

Next was to create the g-code to run the robot. We use the incredibly great open source software called “EMC2” as our machine controller, which just so happens to come with a great little program called “Image to gcode” that let’s you go from a grayscale indexed image to a depthmap g-code. Basically I used the Gimp to index the above image to 8 shades of gray, then imported the image to EMC2 with Image to g-code. Nothing to it!

Next was to get the pumpkin on the RoGR (Lumenlab’s Robloks Gantry Robot)…

The amount of Z clearance is rather huge for a big gourd, but the RoGR is not a normal “CNC mill”. The RoGR was designed to be a modular robotics manufacturing platform, and one of the things I was sure to build into the machine was the ability to easily raise and lower the working platform. In less than 5 minutes, my coworker and I had the bed dropped and the pumpkin mounted.

I then imported my indexed PNG to EMC2. The generated tool paths look like this:

Nothing left but to fire it up! The job was run at 120IPM and took about 20 minutes to complete.

EW!

Hard to believe that’s me!

Here’s a video!

I used an air nozzle to blow the puree out of the carving. It was the consistency of baby food. When it was all said and done, I think it came out great! You can learn more about RoGR in the forums.

Repost from April, 2008.

I grabbed a couple of longer videos showing the machine stroking some letters with a Sharpie.

The first was a note to my parents. I only used the cheesy script to watch
the curves. The random lines are just where I was setting the Z. It
took me a couple tries to get it right.