Another brilliant work by a master of the arts and sciences, Tim Hunkin. His cartoons that cover, well pretty much everything you can think of, are a joy to browse through and are sure to get your mind a churning.
Author: John
Latest Master of the Automaton
These are brilliant works, very much in the same line as the works of Tim Hunkin (a personal hero of mine).
… he started researching kinetics and developed his own system for animating wood-carved figures with the turn of a crank. One of the results was a small body of work featuring important modern artists acting out some of their more eccentric or unfavorable characteristics. In “Picasso and Barbie,” the famously promiscuous Spaniard paints a portrait from a model, in this case a scantily clad blond doll in a suggestive pose. A crank on the piece powers a network of exposed gears that move the artist’s arm up and down, as if painting, and turn his head back and forth from the model to the canvas.
[via suicidebots]
Cardboard Robot Halloween Costume of Doom
In 2004 I ended up having some time on my hands about three days before a big Halloween party. I did what anyone would do, I built robot costume out of cardboard boxes and dryer hose.
Sorry the photos aren’t better, for some weird reason I had set my camera on super low file size. I wish I had taken more shots of the build but I was trying to meet a deadline.
The whole thing was bonded together with tape (clear packing and gaffers), hot glue, and lots of brass paper brads. I used dryer hose for the arms and as it had to fit up to my shoulders I clipped the wires in them for about eight inches on the inside at the tops and covered them with some gaffers tape so I wouldn’t get poked. I tied them together with two short sections of rope,one across my chest and the other on my back. This kept the sleeves from coming off and falling to my wrists. I added some cardboard cuffs to hide the claw interface.
The claws were made from heavy tag board and regular corrugated cardboard. I wore them like mittens and my fingers ran through some cardboard loops on the inside so I could operate them. The hinges were paper brads.
I wanted rivets on my robot so I used about two boxes of brads all over the thing. They worked real well as surface detail and as actual mechanical reinforcements. I ran tape on the backside to avoid the sharp ends.
The name badge was simply an old LED chaser badge that I had built in the late 80’s. I mounted it to the costume with hot glue. I added some details like the chest logo and the static bag eyes after I slathered on a few coats of this water based gray paint I found at Home Depot.
The costume was a success, after the party I went trick or treating with my kids and I can’t tell you how many comments I got from kids and parents alike.
For more photos of my costume, got have a look at the photos on Flickr.
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ifusion Stereo PMP Display
In the ever popular search for cool gear for your gear I saw this. It says that by sticking this special screen over your personal media player and bam! You get eye popping 3d media. Well… Hold on there. i know a little bit about autostereo displays. I’m going to take a stab in the dark and make a guess how this works. First you are going to need some content in 3D. Left and right images or clips of video taken with a 3d camera. That’s a no brainer. Second, the content will have to go through a special media player that will either interlace the left and right feeds on the fly or will play back stuff that you have converted on your PC. It more than likely has more horsepower than a PMP. What you will get when you look at the PMP with out the special screen will be a sliced up picture that has striped of content side by side. Maybe a few pixels wide. The screen is a lenticular lens array that will shift the slices of image to it’s respective eye. A good example of all this is an article on DIY lenticular prints that I wrote up a few days ago. I’ve seen professional systems that have these, nice 36" LCD screens, and the images look pretty good. Or it will use a red/green color image anaglyph. Those look ok in my opinion. I’ve never seen a color anaglyph that looks 100 percent real. I’m hoping for a true stereo image but you can never tell.
I’m looking forward to seeing one of these sceens in place one day. I have a crap load of stereo images and I’d love to show them to people from my PDA.
[via ubergizmo]
Logan’s Run Gun Memories
One of the first props that I ever made was a DS pistol from the movie Logan’s Run
Memory jogged via Props and Costumes form Logans Run
CF to IDE Adapter
I’ve seen these in a local monster computer store here in Arizona. I was tempted to get one but I couldn’t think of a good reason to own one. Of course, if you want one you can get a CF to IDE
I did speak to a guy that was building a robot that would run Linux off from an old desktop computer. He was trying to figure out a way to extend the battery life of the system, the motorcycle batteries just weren’t lasting as long as he had hoped. I told him about these and he was quite pleased. Using a compact flash card in place of a hard drive should save him a few amps off his power load.