Wave of the future or messy addiction? This gizmo uses a shortwave radio reciever to create what they dub very slow scan TV. The machines is a Canvas of ink filled bubble wrap. It is able to create 1 frame of Video per day. At 24 frames per second you can make a 30 second commercial in 720 days, or 1.97 years… AT very low def i might add. with shifty color…

Ok at some point its not tech and its just fun because we can. The scanner travels back and forth across the canvas which is a giant roll of bubble wrap injecting dye inot each bubble. The problem is that TV is don in RGB, percentages of Red Green and Blue, as the three primary colors of light. Pigment doesn’t work that way so they need to use Cyan Magenta and Yellow dye to create similar colors. CYM. Which is the same set of basic inks most printers use. Bigger images and a video of the contraption in action after the jump Read the rest of this entry »

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I love snow and i love the cold so i’v been in a very tired heaven this year. This is also not the officially snowiest winter in Philadelphia history with over 60 inches of snowfall since December. Wow! Tonights bit of snowy awesomeness covers robots, design principles, retro game cakes and coffee best practices, and new wave building materials.

“Life is not one big joke, its a series of little jokes all lined up in a row… there they are look at them” ~Richard Pryor, Moving

There must be something in the water supply this week, or the moon is in an odd alignment or possibly, just possibly everyone I know is having at bad week at the same time. So I’m here to spread a little story and a chuckle.

I have been rebuilding our oldest plotter in work; a plotter is a big printer for those who didn’t know. This Bike sized printer has had more than its share of problems, but today took the cake. I finish a massive rebuild of the drive system, fixing belt issues, tracking strips and tension-er assemblies. This rebuild took the better part of two weeks. Its sounds more like a car then a printer right now. I put the last screw in, turn it on and watch the standard settings / printer test scroll across the LCD.

Just as the first text flashes onto the screen a smoke signal puffs up from the back of the plotter. followed by another. Either we had been inhabited by very tiny indigenous people or something was very wrong. I pull the cord out of the wall with a nice big blue spark and spin the machine around only to find a big puff of smoke coming out of a hatch. open the hatch see a sparky / smokey mess fizzle out. Not… Good… So the parts are on order to fix this.

You know you’re having one of those days when your printer catches fire… little did I know there was actually an error message for it lp0 on fire! Now I know what to file the report under. Thanks Chris for the heads up re the error