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!

CNC bench on wheels

I got this nice little bench from a picker I know. I try to put everything in my shop on casters, but didn’t want to spend too much, so here’s a set of old casters I got for $5 being hacked into a pice of plywood.

 I cut out some footholds from scrap on the bandsaw.

Estate Sale pan and knife

Hit a semi-disappointing sale this morning. Not too much of interest, or as pickers say, nothing had any age on it.

The two finds I did get: a great little Griswold no. 3 cast iron pan for $5. Nicely seasoned, probably perfect for a grilled cheese sandwich I’ll be making for lunch…

The other thing I picked up is this kooky Keen Kutter pocket knife. It’s a bone handled Barlow model, made from 1940-1960. Blade marked “K288 1/2”.

I call it kooky due to the tip. Looks like the previous owner snapped it off and then did a nice job cleaning it up into a concave dip. I probably paid too much at $10, but I like its apparent history.

I can tell from the other knives at the estate that the previous owner really had a problem with using knives as screwdrivers/pry bars. At least this one has a nifty attempt at saving it.

Coffee & Tool & Coffee Tool of the Day

Today I’m featuring an electrician’s Leatherman, the E4 Squirt, and a Modern Times (beer brewer/coffee roaster from San Diego) Black House coffee brewed in a Bialetti moka pot my mom gave me. (I think it was from my Zia Wanda’s kitchen in Cassino, Italy.)

I really like the E4 because it’s got a good set of wire strippers/cutters on it, and the Philips screwdriver is a pretty nice one. I keep it in my jeans coin pocket.

Coffee & Tool of the Day

Inspired by Dominic Morrow’s Tool of the Day posts, here’s my new feature: Coffee & Tool of the Day.

The macchiato is from Commissary Coffee in Burbank, the pico widgy pry bar is from County Comm, and is a great little tool to keep on your keychain.

Sheet Metal Tool Tray

I harvested sheet metal from an old fluorescent light fixture, and spot welded strips together to make a little tool tray.

Welding a Welder Holder to a Welding Cart

I have this great little welding cart I got from a picker. The size was almost — but not quite — perfect to hold my little MIG welder underneath. I got 10′ of 1/2″ 16 gauge steel square tubing for $2.06 at Industrial Metal Supply’s remainders bin and cut two lengths down to size to fit the footprint of the welder.  I welded them to the cart and now it’s all neatly contained.

1/2″ 16ga. HR steel square tubing

removing rust with a flap wheel

dry fit is good and tight

merging metals

gorgeous, award-winning weld

exciting action shot

my MIG welder has a home

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.

Arduino GRANDE Tutorial

I love Arduino! But the boards are so tiny that they can be difficult to hug. And not so easy to see, either, if you’re a student sitting at the back of a classroom. So why not solve both problems by building a really huge, fully-functioning Arduino that’s six times larger than real life?

By popular demand, I finally put together a tutorial for building your own not-so-micro microcontroller:

https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-GRANDE-the-Huge-Microcontroller/?ALLSTEPS

John Park’s Workshop Project Videos

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