All articles by pierre
All the way down the genealogical rabbit hole
It was 12:45am on July 12, 2017 and I was lying awake in bed, scrolling through the last vestiges of Amazon’s Prime Day sale. I managed to resist the urge to buy unnecessary junk all day, but my brain decided that there had to be some great deal that I just had not found yet...
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A 3D printed organizer for Splendor
A weeks ago I spotted a /r/boardgames/ post about a foamcore minimalist organizer for the fantastic tabletop game called Splendor. I thought this was pretty awesome and was inspired to create a 3D printable variant of this design since I’m lazy and cutting/gluing foamcore sounds like work (but CAD design apparently isn’t? ::boggle::). I’m quite...
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Creating a customized robot bottle opener
While browsing a recent issue of Make magazine, I found a list of CNC projects that caught my eye. In particular, the wood and aluminum bottle opener appeared to be ripe for customization with a bit of laser etching. The first step was to determine what art to use for the laser etching. With the...
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2014 Palm Beach Maker Camp at the South Florida Science Center and Aquarium
We are very happy to report a second successful year of Maker Camp in Palm Beach! In 2013, Palm Beach LED held the first and only Maker Camp in Florida and nearly in the entire Southeastern United States. In 2014, there was an explosion of Maker Camps across the state, and we were thrilled to...
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Palm Beach Maker Camp featured in Palm Beach Post!
Featured in the Palm Beach Post was the third week of Maker Camp at the South Florida Science Center, co-sponsored by the Science center and Palm Beach LED Makerspace. This camp session featured Introduction to Robotics with LEGO Mindstorms where campers created robotic vehicle to simulate the Mars Rover and the self driving Google Car....
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Introduction to 3D printing at the Jupiter library
Palm Beach LED gave an ‘Introduction to 3D printing’ presentation at the Jupiter library on June 25th. It was great to see so many community members interested in this technology and asking lots of questions! Thank you to the Jupiter library for inviting us to speak and for hosting this event!...
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Hovership – a quadrotor experiment
The past few years have seen impressive changes in the quadrotor field, both in availability of powerful and sophisticated components for hobbyists and in the quality of research at various universities. After recently discovering an interesting looking 3D printable quadrotor frame on Thingiverse called Hovership, I decided it was high time to have a go...
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3D printed selfies, lithopanes and chocolate molds
After a year or so of tinkering with and learning about 3D printing, there are a few applications I have come across which stood out as being particularly unique or interesting. I have included a brief description of each below along with links where you can find more information if you are interested in trying...
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Creating a 3D printed backlit business card
I was looking for an excuse to teach myself how to use Tinkercad a few months ago and that excuse conveniently presented itself in the form of the Palm Beach LEDlaunch event....
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Building the 3DR Simple Delta
A few months ago, after having built the Printrbot Simple, I was browsing the Printrbottalk forums and came across a rather interesting post by JohnSL. John had modified the RichRap 3DR design to allow it to be built with the components available from the Printrbot Simple. Specifically, the design reused the most valuable components from the...
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Building the Printrbot Simple
Last year, shortly after building my first 3D printer, I came across a tweet from Printrbot about an opportunity to test a new printer called the Printrbot Simple. The Simple was particularly attractive because it was small enough to be portable and it was only $250 for complete a beta tester kit. Looking for #printrbot_simple...
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3D printing: Here come the hot steppers
Shortly after becoming completely fascinated with 3D printing last year, I decided to get a printer to use at home. After a bit of research, I settled on the RepRapPro Tricolour Mendel kit. The features and machine specifications were on par with other machines available at the time, but the Tricolour Mendel featured the ability...
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From zero to 3D printing
The first time I saw a 3D printer was at the 2012 Orlando Mini Maker Faire. Among the many interesting projects and technologies on display at the Faire were a number of hand built 3D printers. They seemed cool at the time, but didn’t stand out any more than the quadcopters, dancing robots or other...
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Teaching the StarBot to sing
My adventure with StarBots started in 2012 when I visited the first Orlando Mini Maker Faire and saw Pat Starace’s fantastic animatronic creations on display. The singing display was very impressive and was easily one of my favorite displays at the event. Luckily, Pat has branched out into making animatronic kits after a very successful...
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2013 Miami Mini Maker Faire
The first annual Miami Mini Maker Faire was this past Saturday at The LAB Miami and was a huge success, drawing over 1,700 attendees. Makers from across Florida were represented at the Faire and had fantastic projects on display. Afterwards, the Faire received great coverage in the press from the Miami Herald, The South Florida...
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Extra Life 2013
Back in August of this year I saw a post on Reddit about an upcoming gaming charity event called Extra Life that caught my eye. The premise of Extra Life is simple: play games for 25 hours straight on November 2nd and raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network. When I mentioned all of this...
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2013 Orlando Mini Maker Faire: South Florida Makers Edition
Last Saturday marked the second annual Orlando Mini Maker Faire. I attended the first Orlando Mini Maker Faire last year and was immediately hooked after seeing all of the fascinating things on display (3D printers, robotics, art and technology) and the enthusiasm demonstrated by those at the Faire. Attending Orlando Faire in 2012 led to...
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The 2013 Palm Beach Maker Camp Success Story!
On June 7th of this year, Palm Beach LED received a notice that we were pre-qualified to be one of 100 global Maker Camp super affiliates. This notice invited us to apply to host a free Maker Camp for local teenagers, which we promptly did. On July 3rd, we received official notification that Palm Beach...
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Orlando Mini Maker Faire back for a 2nd year!
The Orlando Mini Maker Faire has announced that it will be returning again this year at the Orlando Science Center on October 5th. If you are anywhere near Orlando in October, this should definitely be on your radar! If you didn’t make it last year and are curious to see what it was like, I have...
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Bonnaroo Belt
I was inspired to do this project after going to Bonnaroo for the first time last year. The idea I had was to take a programmable belt kit, hook it up to an Arduino microcontroller and microphone and make a wearable VU meter....
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How FourSquare helped me find an awesome goat
Say hello to Otis. Internet, Otis. Otis, Internet. Now that the introductions have been made, let me tell you the story of how FourSquare helped me find Otis the goat....
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So, you want to do some hacking with your kinect…
If you have read any technology blog in the past few months, chances are good that you have seen an ever increasing number of blog posts about people hacking their Xbox Kinect to do all kinds of really cool stuff. If you are like me, you found yourself thinking ‘I have got a really cool...
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Help! My air hockey table grew a robot arm!
Four blog posts later and we’ve arrived at the last nostalgia blog post in the series. Ready for the story about the air hockey table that grew a Lynxmotion robot arm and learned how to play? Great! In the fall of 2004, I signed up to take a Video Processing course as a follow-up to...
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The world’s least expensive pipetting robot
In 2005, as part of a graduate course on robotics, the team of Melissa Morris, John Morris, Thomas Kelly and I set about repurposing a JOT automation system (http://www.jotautomation.com/) which housed a four axis Hirata robot (http://www.hirata.it/) and was donated to FAU from Motorola. The system, pictured below, was originally used to print and apply...
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Yet Another Wiimote Controlled Robot
As part of the Scripps Florida grand opening celebration in 2009, the volunteer robotics team at Scripps Florida was tasked with repurposing a laboratory robot for use as demonstration unit and an Educational Outreach platform. This volunteer team consisted of Lina DeLuca, Dr. Louis Scampavia and myself. The goal of this project was to create...
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Robot + MATLAB + Webcam =
As the second post of the series and representing another nostalgic trip down memory lane, this post is dedicated to the first robotic vision system that I ever built....
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Dude, there’s a harmonica stuck in my printer!
I was recently rooting around on an old computer when I came across some files relating to projects I put together back in the undergraduate and graduate days. I thought they might be better served posted somewhere than gathering dust, so here we go!...
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iMovie for iPhone 4
To test the new video capture and editing capability of the new iPhone 4, I took it on a trip to the local state park, John D. MacArthur Beach State Park. The goal was to capture some video, edit it on the iPhone and then post the result to YouTube....
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STS-132 NASA Tweetup – Tweet harder.
The tale of @Kabong’s journey to Houston, TX for the STS-132 NASATweetup....
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STS-129 NASA Tweetup
The tale of @Kabong’s journey to the Kennedy Space Center for the STS-129 NASATweetup....
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