CNC Circuit Playground Holder

I decided I needed a Circuit Playground and Circuit Playground Express render farm. Here’s the stand I made on the CNC machine.

I designed it in Fusion 360 and then milled it with the Othermill Pro. First, I ran a pocket clearing pass.

Next, I ran a pencil pass to clear out the scooped out slots for the curvature of the boards.

These rough passes left behind a bit of material, as you can see here.

The final cleanup was a parallel pass with a fairly tight stepover, I ran it at 90 degrees from the stock, so it followed the grooves and had longer runs.

Here it is with a Circuit Playground Express nestled in it lovingly.

Here you’ll see some purple prototype boards, and the new red Circuit Playground Classic Digi-Key will be selling as part of the “buy one , give one” donation program for Girls Who Code

Here’s the full set, ready for various tutorials I’m working on with MakeCode, Arduino, and Circuit Python!

Doris the Robotic Bowler Hat from Disney’s Meet the Robinsons

The coolest robot I’ve ever built was made of pixels. Here’s Doris, the robotic bowler hat from Disney’s Meet the Robinsons. As a character technical director at Walt Disney Animation Studios at the time, my job was to create all of the rigging and controls the animators needed to pose and animate this creepy, evil robot.

Building the Doris rig was a really fun challenge — the script called for her to fly, crawl like a hexapod, hide all parts and appear as an ordinary bowler hat, extend her lens, poke a top-mounted arm holding a toothbrush, screwdriver, or flashlight through a retractable hatch, shoot a grappling hook, and deploy multiple spinning claw hands on infinitely long flexible metal arms.

I created her rig in Autodesk Maya, first by placing skeletal joint pivots for all of the articulated parts, and then through a series of MEL scripts I wrote to create deformations, animator-friendly controllers, forward/inverse and spline kinematics, constraints, and semi-automated parts, such as the iris and the retractable ports from which the various arms, grappling hooks, goggles and so on would emerge. I collaborated with incredibly talented people, including modeler Joe Bowers and animator Jay Davis, to bring her to life.

John Park’s Workshop Project Videos

Here’s a handy playlist of my Adafruit project video series:

Draughting Pencils, Robot Screws, more

Delightful little box of useful items I found at a garage sale. Pretty good value for five US dollars.

The Eagle #314 “Chemi-Sealed” DRAUGHTING pencils are excellent, highly coveted pencils among illustrators. This style was made from 1950-1980. More info here. I gave one to my ridiculously talented friend Mark Frauenfelder, who swears by vintage Blackwing’s. We’ll see how he feels this one compares.

Next up, some nice boxes of screws, including a gross of blued, round head steel 5/8″ #6 wood screws from National Products. Just look at that NAT the Robot logo they had! Love.

I also found a warded lock key, a pencil protector, two heavy duty switches, and this lovely Brunswick pool cue chalk.

3D Printing Projects book released

Hey look, the new book is out! That’s my flower care robot, Chauncey, there on the cover. (He waters that flower whenever the soil runs dry.)

I’m very excited and proud to have contributed to this lovely new book from Maker Media chocked full of projects you can build with a 3D printer, some electronics and mechanical parts, and a bit of gumption. The central notion behind 3D Printing Projects: Toys, Tools, and Contraptions to Print and Build Yourself is “You’ve got a 3D printer, and you’ve downloaded and printed a few Yoda heads and vases — now what?”

The projects all go beyond static prints, and into functional builds that show the true utility of desktop prototyping and additive building when combined with other techniques, including print finishing/painting, friction welding, embedded electronics, physical computing, and mechanism design. Downloadable model files are available on the book’s companion site, and we’ve got a GitHub repository set up for any code downloads, such as the Arduino sketch that powers my flower bot.

I’d like to also give an enormous public, internet hug and thank you to my creative collaborator, Barry McWilliams, who inspired me with his Wrylon Robotical Illustrated Catalog of Botanical Delivery ‘Bots, and who designed my darling little robot, Chauncey.

If you’re interested in learning how to make your own Chauncey, or animatronic eyes, or a ballpoint pen raygun, an inverted RC trike, and more, from a very talented group of makers, including John Baichtal, James Floyd Kelly, and Brook Drumm,  please check it out on Amazon, at O’Reilly, in your local Barnes & Noble, or other local bookstore. I promise it will give invigorating new purpose to your 3D printer!

 

On Space Planning



I have a bad habit of building prototypes right in front of the keyboard I need to access for coding said prototypes.

How to Make a Baymax-o’-lantern

Here’s how I made a quick Baymax-o’-lantern from a squat, white pumpkin.

I’m not Baymax. I’m not in focus, either.

Hi there. This doesn’t hurt.

 

Sorry pumpkin. It’s hand brace and auger bit time.

 

Don’t come near me with that thing!

 

Pretty curls. And orange guts!

 

I saw that.

 

All clean. Wish I’d kept the line a bit thinner.

 

Hairy baby.

 

Disney Research

I’m thrilled to announce my new position as a Producer at Disney Research! Starting in December, I’ll be working to share the research scientists’ innovations in areas including robotics, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, and computational materials with the other divisions of Disney. It’ll draw upon both my maker and CG animation experiences. Should this somehow lead to airborne swarms of tiny Imagineering spider drones assisting us all with our luggage at Shanghai Disneyland, my dreams will have been realized.

Automatic Nerf Sentry Gun

I built this Nerf Sentry Gun by grafting a couple of Arduinos, a power supply, a motor, and an ultrasonic distance sensor onto a Nerf Vulcan machine gun. I posted these build notes on Make: online. I’ve never compiled them all in one place, however, so this post serves to tie the whole project together in one place.

Part 1: Wiring the trigger

The first step was to add wiring and a two-wire connector to control the trigger circuit. I opened up the Nerf Vulcan (about 30 screws) and soldered an 1/8″ female jack to the fire selection mode switch. This way, I can retain all the regular functions of the gun when it’s unplugged from the Arduino. To control it from the Arduino, I’ll flip the orange switch on top to “off” and then wire the trigger into the “pulled” position (done here with a classy twist tie). Whenever the Arduino’s trigger circuit closes (bypassing that orange “off” switch) the gun will start firing.

To add the connector, I drilled a 1/4″ hole in the gun’s hand grip, fed the sleeve through, and secured it with a couple of zip ties inside for strain relief.

Next, I’m planning to build the Arduino’s trigger circuit using a MOSFET transistor wired to a male 1/8″ jack I can plug into the gun.

Imperial Melody Discharger – Stormtrooper helmet art build notes

I built the Imperial Melody Discharger, an articulated Stormtrooper helmet music box, for the Star Wars Day (“May the 4th be with you”) vinyl Stormtrooper helmet art show . For the event, artists across the Walt Disney Company, including DisneyToon Studios where I work, were invited to participate by using a blank 6″ helmet as the canvas for their work. What follows are my build notes and work in progress images.

My intention for the piece was to provide a view behind the mask of the anonymous Stormtrooper, while creating a fun, interactive moment for the person experiencing it. I wasn’t sure exactly how to get there, but I was certain I’d need to cut the vinyl helmet open. You only have one shot at that, so I decided to first cut apart a CG model inside Maya, and rig it with pivot points that could be used in the real world for the facial articulation.

Mostly satisfied that I knew where to separate the parts of the helmet, I grabbed an X-acto knife, took a breath, and began the incision. (Note: It smelled really foul in there. Also note: I have no way to compare the smell to that of the insides of a tauntaun.)

Once splayed out I wasn’t too surprised to see that the “pelt” of the helmet was darned floppy. I needed to build an armature to keep the structure solid, and to support the articulation of the two halves of the face mask.

With very little time to get fancy building parts from scratch, I rummaged around my workshop, closets, and shamefully disorganized garage, until I came upon an old spider Babyface homage to Toy Story I’d build back in ’95 out of Erector sets. Sorry, Spider Baby, I needed your body parts.