PVC PIPE ARMATURE FOR YETI
Buy PVC pipe, handsaw, sandpaper, and glue from the hardware store to create your own creature. Shawn and I made this project in a day. We measured extensively! The armature is designed to be portable and take the trade shows. I hope to one day make other creatures besides the Yeti picture below, and add motors to turn it into an animatronic.
My Self-Portrait as a 3D PRINT
Here is my scan from the XBox Kinect in 2014. The 3D print has low resolution, but it is easy to scan in a classroom setting. Buy a used Kinect for $20 from GameStop for those on a shoestring budget. Next, spin 360 degrees in your office chair to record all your facial data & node points.
FUSION 360
Designing Fidget Spinners with Fusion 360 is super-easy! I learned from the Youtubiversity.
FASHION TECHNOLOGY
Make a sound-reactive LED shirt to wear out on the town!
Add an electret mic to the Flora microcontroller with neopixel library. Solder neopixels to silicon stranded wire and pinouts, and upload the arduino library. Place on a tank top, with care to stretching and snags. I like to wear them under diffused shirts. Let the mic pick up sound, and light up like an equalizer. Yes, I look like a human disco ball!
Solder an RF microcontroller to LED matrix for text messaging to your clothes.
Solder you name in LEDs on a badge to wear to conferences.
I bought this kit from the Maker Shed. My five letter name fit nicely on the matrix of LEDs. I love badges with animations, and am working on programming the Adafruit PyBadge, too.
Space Cowgirl Chic: Add a quote to EL Tape for a lit up cowboy hat.
Look at the lit-up band on my cowgirl hat. That is 12 Volts of neon EL Tape with a Dolly Parton quote taped on top that says, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”
Pinball Machine
Speaking of Dolly, I spent a year restoring my Bally 1979 pinball machine, thanks to the Dallas pinball crew, “DMS Vector.” Old school electronics with solid state boards at times just take a reflow of the solder (lead) and/or changing out bad caps (capacitors) to make the traces conductive again.
Vector design is fabulous for laser cutting, CNC, business card design, plasma cutter, or vinyl cutter because it’s scalable. Try out Inkscape if you don’t have access to the Adobe Creative Suite.
Draw a Robot from Inkscape and send to the Laser Cutter. I liked my drawing of the robot and tested its etching on a wooden panel:
I drew the pterodactyl in Inkscape and sent the design to the laser cutter. As you can see in the middle photo, the cork material lasers well. However when I attempted to laser cut the design on conductive fabric, the laser burned part of the fabric. It is recommended to use self-adhesive tape to keep the fabric in place on the laser bed before laser cutting next time.
I inkscaped a tardigrade because I love the extremophiles that can survive in zero gravity! I got a t-shirt made with a github / Texan reference– “Git up, Makers!” Screen prints of the water bears are in the works.
Prototype an LED necklace!
I soldered Adafruit Gemma, three LED rings, and then wired them to a LiPo battery. Solder wire to the appropriate pins and upload the Arduino “infinity code” from Adafruit. Add a 3D print for the rest of the necklace.
Use the Form 2 to resin print SLA-style jewelry.
I did not design this awesome spiral, but downloaded it from thingiverse. SLA printing allows for better detail, so this printer is nice for jewelry.
Make a Metal Keychain.
Here is a selfie of me in mask while using the CNC Plasmacutter. I made a metal keychain in our class. The sparks were a bit terrifying!
Make Ginger Beer.
This ingredients of the syrup is made of ginger, lemon, sugar, and pepper. Add to selzer and it tastes super!
MOSAICS
Experimenting with mosaic-making below. Here’s an attempt at an armadillo. I will need to try again, since I’m learning how colors pop differently with glass, and chunks of the same color stand out better.
COSTUMES
“Moisturize me! Moisturize me!” My Halloween costume is Cassandra, the stretched piece of skin and last human from “Doctor Who.”
GRIT and GROWTH MINDSET
It’s okay to mess up! Fail, fail, and fail again. I meant to brew kombucha for a thick, leathery biofabric to sew after watching this TedTalk. Unfortunately my kombucha molded after three weeks instead of properly thickening. Argh! I need more heat, I think.
