Entries in Category Engineering and Inventions

Zip-Tie Organizing

Here's a new video in my "Pushing Back the Chaos" series. In this short one I 3D-print some wall-mounted bins for my large and varied collection of zip ties. See some satisfying organization and don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe!

X-Carve Rescue Episode 2: Dust Collection, Modifications, Tweaks

Finally, here is the long awaited next chapter in the saga of this long-neglected CNC machine. In this one I hook up dust collection with a 3D-printed dust shoe, add stiffening modifications to the Y-axis rails, attach the machine to the torsion box tabletop I built in the last episode, and make many tweaks to get this machine running right.

Part 2 of a series!

Using a Laser Pointer and 3D Printing to Align Electrical Conduit

As part of my ongoing garage renovation I installed new LED light fixtures on the ceiling. This required me to rebuild the existing network of surface-mounted conduits and brought to light some disturbing discoveries about the state of the electrical system in the garage I've lived next to, in blissful ignorance, since 2019. For more on that, watch the video above and learn how NOT to wire a garage with an extra circuit.

In addition to the downright hazardous faults I'm referring to was a class of problems that rise to the level of the merely annoying. One of those: the ceiling box that the lights depend on was rotated by a small but immediately apparent angle from the walls of the building. If, as planned, I installed the linear LED lamps using conduits connected to the box, the pattern of lights would not be perpendicular to anything else, which I obviously could not accept.

X-Carve Rescue Episode 1: Torsion Box, Cleanup, and Rebuild

New video! I rescue this X-Carve CNC router by tearing it down, cleaning it up, putting it back together, and building a "torsion box" tabletop for it to live on. Part 1 of a series!

Measuring Rotation Rates of Objects Using Machine Vision

I've recently submitted a machine vision paper to arxiv (my first!), co-authored with Daniel Raviv and Juan Yepes of Florida Atlantic University, about an analytical method for measuring the angular velocity of rotating objects. If you can track one point on an object reliably you can estimate the rotation rate, given that you have an orthographic camera at your disposal. Okay, they don't exist in reality! But if the object is far enough away the approximation provided by a real camera is good enough to be useful. Please read “A Vision-Based Closed-Form Solution for Measuring the Rotation Rate of an Object by Tracking One Point” at arxiv.org.

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