Look of Disapproval Glasses

April 24, 2012April 23, 2012 Plasma2002 4 Comments

A few months before I got my laser cutter, I had seen a pair of glasses for sale that had mimicked the infamous Look of Disapproval. ಠ_ಠ

I loved them so much, that I had decided to buy the set from the seller, Tim Saylor. After I had my laser set up, I wanted to try my hand at designing my own pair. I opened up Inkscape and just started drawing out what I could.

While I still think that Tim did a much better job on his than I did on mine, when I put the file on Thingiverse it almost instantly obtained a lot of attention. A few people asked me if then could buy a pair, so I put the glasses up on an Etsy page for users to buy.

This was probably the first time I had a run-in with this issue. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but what I was effectively doing was stealing business from Tim Saylor. While I may have created the design of the glasses that I was selling, I was taking away business from somebody who had inspired me in the first place.

This may be an effective business model, but it’s not something I agree with, nor is it something I would want to happen to myself. I started redirecting users away from my Etsy shop and back to Mr. Saylor’s.

I will most definitely have to start thinking about things like this in the future when making designs that may end up being sold.

Old School Rocket

April 23, 2012April 23, 2012 Plasma2002 12 Comments

As one of my first project cuts on the Laser (which still needs a name btw), I cut out the Old School Rocket, created and shared on Thingiverse by Mathieu Glachant. I first cut it out on card board to see how well it would work, then after I was happy with the results, I cut it out on MDF. Had a blast making it.

On buying and using a laser cutter

April 18, 2012November 28, 2012 Plasma2002 10 Comments

After an unexpected tax return came in, I finally decided to get a laser cutter. One had been on my wish list for quite some time, and this was the perfect excuse to take the plunge.

After reading a bunch of online reviews, I decided to buy Full Spectrum’s 40W Deluxe Hobby Laser. After owning and using it for 2 months now, I would definitely consider it a good decision. This post should explain the rundown of how I set it up, what I found out, and what you can probably expect, should you choose to invest in your own laser cutter.

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Party Scroller

August 31, 2011July 28, 2016 Plasma2002 7 Comments

Those jumbo screens at concerts that display your text messages can be a lot of fun. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have the same thing for your own parties or social gatherings? Well I tested that question. As it turns out, guests love it

Why

concertWall I’ve always loved the idea of sending messages to the big screens you usually find at concerts and other large events. I figured it could be scaled down, while still being just as entertaining. It may not have one of those spiffy 5-digit phone numbers, but the Google Voice number that it uses works just as well – especially since it also works as a vanity number for my handle 🙂

After testing the sign at a party held at home, I noticed that people really seemed to enjoy it. One part of it that led to people enjoying it was the fact that the messages were anonymous. While it would have been really easy to make the sign show who the message was from, if theres one thing I’ve learned from the internet, it’s that people love being anonymous. Leaving a message that your peers can see, without knowing who wrote it, will always invoke the most curious behavior.

With any anonymity, comes that behavior. I already knew that, so I took the liberty to set up some bad-word filters to start replacing parts of messages. You can see that list in one of the scripts below – which is most likely causing Google to flag my page as inappropriate, but I digress… Not only did this keep the board clean, but it was even more entertaining to people to see such ‘odd’ words come up in their messages. It only kept people texting more and more to see what other replacements they could figure out.

All in all, it really seems this experiment was a success. People loved it, and I loved setting it up. I highly recommend you do the same for your next party or other event. As long as your guests have their cell phones, they’re definitely going to be tempted to send something.

Technical Details

The Party Scroller makes use of several servers (more…)

Auger and a Laser Cutter

June 10, 2011June 10, 2014 Plasma2002 Leave a comment

What happens when you have one auger lying around, and a laser cutter that you’re just dying to make something with? You make a dog-food hopper!

The motor assembly was taken out of an old CD-ROM drive, and the rest was modeled around it via Google Sketchup. It was then exported to SVG and sent to the laser. Everything went better than expected 🙂

Now all that’s left to do is to cut some trash-can inserts out of plywood to keep the kibble near the auger pickup.

The Button

April 10, 2011 Plasma2002 3 Comments

What’s it gonna do?