Worx Mulcher Paper Bag Adapter
I use a leaf mulcher to help me compress an entire yards worth of leaves into as few bags as possible because I need to drive my yard waste to the county dropoff point myself. Unfortunately, the county only accepts...
Automatic Dice Tower First Prototype
The first thing to build in a technically challenging project is a functional prototype that helps to test and iterate on the core technical problems without being constrained by environmental, reliability, or aesthetic requirements. For the first functional prototype of...
Automatic Dice Tower Vision Software Prototyping
Using a cell phone, some old dice I had laying around, and a table in my garage I was able to capture some fairly consistent images of both individual dice to use as templates and groups of dice to use...
Automatic Dice Tower Research
There are plenty of examples online, especially academic content, involving people trying to detect the presence of and values of game dice. Classic six sided dice (with “pips” or “dots” instead of Arabic numerals) are the most common target because...
Automatic Dice Tower Project
My wife and I started playing D&D with some friends a few years ago (after a gateway 3-year Gloomhaven campaign!) and were subsequently introduced to the insane dice culture of the hobby. While there are certainly apps available to roll...
Richlite Cutting Boards
When my personal cutting boards began to show their age this fall I began to search for good replacements. After talking to my wife about my research she asked why I would want to buy cutting boards when I’ve engraved...
Large Lake Clock Build
I decided to build a miniature 2′ x 2′ version of the clock before beginning the final 4′ x 4′ version. This let me test out the different methods and processes used before a lot of material was on the...
Large Lake Clock Design
I spend a lot of time in the summer swimming and floating with friends and family in the lake down the hill from my house. It is easy to lose track of time while relaxing, and I don’t bring a...
Guitar Robot Fingering Analysis
Turning a tablature file into a set of physical motions on the robot involves a lot of software work: parsing a GuitarPro file, considering potential fingerings for each note, planning the transitions between those fingerings, and optimizing the solution around...
Robot Guitar Architecture
The general architecture of a robot guitar will obviously share similarities with the way humans interact with the guitar: a set of actuators for plucking and a set of actuators for fretting. However, the complexity of some of those actuators...