Warranty Void if Removed

A few weeks back I was thinking of ways to fuse electronics with jewellery. The first one I came up with was an LED on diamond. You could have a classical diamond ring with an LED built in the bulk. Gold contacts could be evaporated on, and could merge in nicely with the rest of the ring! ...

Digital photo frames are cool, but are a terrible waste of power. A photo frame is only useful while someone's looking at it. What I need to do is make a digital photo frame with a small camera built in. Every second or so it wakes up, takes a photo and performs face detection on the image. If someone is looking at it, it stays on and displays a photo until the viewer looks away. 

An extension would be to extract the position and size of the face to guesstimate the viewer's position in 3D space. Then apply Johnny Lee style head tracking to display a window into a 3D  world beyond the screen. Would be great to look at your wall and have a window to a prehistoric world with dinosaurs wandering around, or something. Move closer to the "window" and you'd see more of the landscape. Walk past the window and your viewing cone would scan the virtual world appropriately. Of course it would only work for one viewer's perspective, but it would still be wicked cool.

There are plenty of other fun things to do with a camera/display combo - hall of mirrors, etc etc.

Hopefully you could save enough power to have a wall-dwelling wireless frame that only needed charging every week or two. If only I had time to try it!

I recently bought a big pile of lathe spares, including a new leadscrew and nut to convert the cross slide to metric. I'm working on gradually converting the whole machine. I started on the cross slide because it's the most commonly used, and typically is used to the tightest tolerances.

Justyn bought an amazing plasma TV on ebay for a bargain £50. It was sold as broken, but it seems the seller was incapable of pressing buttons - it actualy works fine. It lacked a stand or any means of attaching it to a wall. For a few weeks it was simply gaffer taped to the radiator, but eventually we could live in fear no longer, and decided to fabricate some brackets.

The back of the TV has some captive nuts to screw a bracket to. Justyn bought two 500mm lengths of 20x20x3 steel box from Metal Supermarkets, and I supplied the metalworking equipment. 

I rescued a 17" Sony SDM-S74 TFT from a WEEE bin. It powered up ok and displayed an image, but the screen went black after about 2 seconds. So I dismantled it and had a look around.

 

It was about time I made a piece of jewellery for my good friend Lou. She likes green, and I like precision handiwork, so I thought this pendant would make a nice birthday present. It features a 6x4mm oval emerald tension set in the central cutout, and two 1.5mm diamonds bead set at the top and bottom.

Attaching a handle to a new graver, grinding it to the right shape for use and forming a sharp, polished cutting face... [flickr-photo:id=1887220359,size=m]

In the early hours of this morning the Z-axis was completed. A new, much higher torque NEMA-23 motor from Motion Control Products (part FL57STH76-2808B ) was added, along with a length of 10x3 trapezoidal leadscrew and nut from Marchant Dice . In addition an adjustable mounting was added to one end of one of the guide rails to allow them to be adjusted perfectly parallel. Here are the results of a pen pretending to isolation mill a circuit board layout. Video:

Over the last week or so, Rob and I have been working frantically on a CNC table for PCB drilling and general experimentation. I've been doing the mechanics, Rob's been doing the software and we've been working together on the electronics. See the flickr set for details of the build so far.

I'll be posting in detail about the construction later on. I've got stacks of blogging to do, but have absolutely no time at the moment!

Very early yesterday morning we got the first output.

Videos follow, in ascending order of awesome...