You can now turn your favourite music downloads into playable records made from materials you have lying around the house.
Amanda Ghassaei, 24, from San Francisco has created the world’s first laser-cut wooden records using songs from Radiohead and Joy Division.
And the software engineer has made the instructions available to download, making it possible to create your own at home.
Ghassaei previously used 3D printers to print records from her MP3 downloads.
She wanted to find a way for people without 3D printers to make their own records, and has designed a way of making records out of paper, acrylic and wood.
Ghassaei created a digital waveform file from the MP3 and converted into a PDF. Needles on a record player pick up vibrations based on the shape of the record’s surface. The waveform was then cut into the wood using lasers to create the ‘shape’ of the song.
From the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard:
Inspired by the biology of a fly, with submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap at 120 times per second, robotic insects, or RoboBees, achieve vertical takeoff, hovering, and steering. The tiny robots flap their wings using piezoelectric actuators — strips of ceramic that expand and contract when an electric field is applied. Thin hinges of plastic embedded within a carbon fiber body frame serve as joints, and a delicately balanced control system commands the rotational motions in the flapping-wing robot, with each wing controlled independently in real-time. Applications of RoboBees could include distributed environmental monitoring, search-and-rescue operations, and assistance with crop pollination.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Golden, Colo. (April 15, 2013) Epilog Laser is excited to announce the Epilog Challenge contest is back for round five, and will be hosted on Instructables.com. “Epilog Challenge V” opens today and runs through July 15, 2013. The lucky grand prize winner will receive a 30-watt Zing 16 Laser from Epilog.
“We’ve always appreciated the tremendous support we’ve received from the DIY community, and no matter who wins this challenge I have no doubt that he or she will make great use of the Zing 16,” said Mike Dean, vice president of sales and marketing for Epilog Laser. “We’re excited to partner with the folks at Instructables.com once again and anticipate seeing some very unique and creative entries.”
“I’m always amazed by the fantastic projects the Epilog Challenge inspires,” said Eric Wilhelm, founder of Instructables.com and director of communities at Autodesk. ”I hope to see even more mind-blowing projects this year!”
At Laserbean, we love a good party. When a great friend said he was going to throw a Bladerunner themed party for his 50th, we were intrigued and excited, knowing just how much effort he typically puts into these things. Then we started pondering about what would make the perfect present to give to him. We decided building him his very own lifesize replicant was probably out of the question (although maybe next time!).
We’re continuing our efforts to enhance traditional jigsaw puzzle craft using new technologies. Today we’re releasing a new series of jigsaw puzzles that can be put together in multiple ways. Each one-of-a-kind puzzle is actually a puzzle in a puzzle!
These 2-in-1 puzzles are designed to be extra challenging. Believe it or not, we’ve had people ask us to make our puzzles harder, so this is our answer. We’ve taken away all the clues that people normally use to put a puzzle together. Like our Natural Puzzles, these puzzles have no image, so assembly is guided solely by the shapes of the pieces. We further intensified the difficulty by eliminating the edge pieces and whimsies that usually serve as helpful starting points for puzzle assembly. Finally, to make things even more interesting, we included a sub-puzzle embedded within the puzzle! Roughly 70 colored pieces distributed throughout the 400-piece rectangular puzzle can be removed to form a smaller, circular puzzle.
Alternate ‘Layer 0′ for Pibow case simplifies wearable Raspberry Pi projects.
Instructions
REQUIRES PIBOW CASE – this is ONLY a replacement bottom layer. Laser cut from 3mm (1/8″) acrylic.
The belt is made from 1.5″ nylon webbing (better-equipped hardware, sewing or camping stores will stock this and related fittings), but it’s also perfectly suited to most camera straps if you have a DSLR + Raspberry Pi project in mind. The USB battery pack is an item from the Adafruit shop, held in place with cable ties.
When you own a laser cutter, careful calibration is key. Get the focal length wrong and, instead of a nice clean cut, you end up with a blurry burn pattern. LaserOrigami takes this problem and turns it into a feature. By aiming a de-focused laser at a section of plastic, it can heat it just enough to allow it to bend. By alternating between cutting, bending, and turning the sheet, the application can make remarkably complicated objects.
Nice round-up by Joseph Flaherty at Wired of some great examples of laser cutting. The table (above, top) is my favorite. He writes:
3-D printers are an exciting technology, but another hot new tool may have just as significant of an impact in real-world projects.
Laser cutters were invented almost 50 years ago, but only became part of the home workshop in the past few years. In that short time, however, the maker community has embraced the machines with creative enthusiasm. While these 2-D cutters don’t produce sweet 3-D Yoda heads at the push of a button, they do bring impressive versatility to a wide range of applications.
If makers want to experiment with creative ideas that need to be produced with engineering-grade plastics, wood, leather, metal, or even food, laser cutters are often the only appropriate tool. Most laser cutters, and their beefy plasma cutter brethren, can produce objects much larger than standard 3-D prints in a much shorter time, and usually for a significantly lower cost. One forward-thinking cafe in Japan has even installed a cutting system so makers can laser cut parts while sipping a latte — whereas waiting for a 3-D printout would require a seven-course meal.
Here’s an project from this past summer that is pretty cool if you missed it. Adafruit community member Paulo Sobrinho sent it in along with the question whether it might be possible “to implement such a cool solution with Raspberry Pi!”
These two systems offer a 32” x 20” engraving table and a variety of features including: joystick control, job time estimator/recorder, large glass door with LED lighting and much more! And because it’s available in both a CO2 and fiber version, the Fusion or FiberMark Fusion can tackle almost any marking or cutting application!
One of our favorite tools in the Adafruit factory is our laser cutter. A laser cutter is a tool made of an XY plotter with a bed about 12″x24″ in size. Instead of a plotting pen, a laser beam is fired so that any shape can be cut out of a flat piece of plastic, wood, fabric, leather, etc. Even though laser cutters can only cut out of flat materials they are surprisingly versatile. By snapping together pieces and gluing or screwing parts together a full enclosure can be made.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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