The plastic that the buckle is made from is very absorbent so I cant just make a mold straight away, it has to be sealed first which means…. lots of spraypainting. Its had about 8 layers of primer and has been sanded after each layer with 320 grit sandpaper, the front now looks like its been molded in clay rather than the original “plastic dust blasted with a laser” look from before.

Next step is to let the paint cure and make a mold, luckily the Silicone has arrived so I can get started on that soon

I sent off the .STL file about 5 days ago and it arrived in the post today, hows that for service? Here’s the final print and original file for comparison

I’m amazed, its kept nearly all of the detail from the original design, some of the ringpiece has been lost but apparently I may be able to regain some of the detail by scrubbing it with a toothbrush.

Next step is to soak it in some sort of polyurethane resin (the plastic is quite a porous material), prime it then create a silicone rubber mold from it. I’ve got 1kg of pewter and 5kg of silicone rubber on the way, hopefully by the end of next week I’ll have solid metal versions of this. Might even consider listing them on Etsy if they come out ok

I’m getting addicted to Shapeways, for those too lazy to click that link theyre a company that own a load of rapid-prototyping machines (or 3D printers for the dumbasses). They let you upload a 3D object from your pc and in 21 days they send it back to you made in glass, plastic or stainless steel. Its really rather good

So of course I’ve dug out an old copy of Blender and started playing about with creating something. First order of business, new ear-tunnels

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This is how a drunk idea becomes real..

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that is all

That tiny little thing in the  middle with the green triangle on it is a surface mount LED. Its about 1mm square and the solder pads are even smaller.

I’ve just wired up 6 of these for something I’m building and now MY EYES HURT

Mucking about with Structure Synth and Sunflow

Warning: geeky headfuck ahead

Things I did wrong and made things fail:

• Listened to the wrong pin on the MCU. No data = no decoding
• Shifted all the bits left by 2, all values were fucked
• Timer was too slow, decimal point in the wrong place
• NEC suck. Go Phillips!

Things that went right:

• The ear-led can now be controlled by infrared!!

Last month I won a load of stuff from Sparkfun during their “free day” promotion, amongst the stuff that I got was a small OLED screen module. TBH at the time I had no idea what to do with it, now I have..

introducing the Gashapon Orchestra!

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I’ve been stretching my earlobes over the last few months and this week I finally hit my target of 5mm.. anyone one thats done this (and has an odd sense of humour..) has been through the point where you think “what can i stick through the hole thats strange and wonderful?”

Well I was ordering some parts for another project and started browsing LED’s, sure enough I spot the “5mm ultrabright” section and start thinking “hey that’d work…”. Well I had a 5mm LED already but it was too large, however the 3mm ones fit in the metal tunnels I have perfectly…

So the engineer-lobe of my brain started working overdrive, How can I power it? How can I hide the power source? Can I make it do anything cooler than just stay on all the time?

Half an hour later I’d ordered a load of ATTiny13 controllers, some Lithium batteries and a load of 3mm LED’s. This morning they arrived so I got to work. First step : making the jump from Arduino to proper AVR coding

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