MF Logo
Come join us at the Maker Faire this year. I will be there with my family & friends on Saturday, May 21st. I’ll also be there on Sunday, May 22nd, to help staff the Ace Monster Toys booth in the Fiesta Hall. I hope to see you there!
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It’s time once again for the Bay Area Maker Faire
May 6, 2011 by Sean
Category ??? | Tags: , awesomeness, diy, makerfaire | Comments Off
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LOL Shield & Arduino
March 29, 2011 by Sean
LED Reader boards, scoreboards, and scrolling marquees have always been an interest for me. So I jumped at the opportunity to make one that’s about the size of a belt buckle. That’s, most likely, what this project will ultimately become. But for now I’ll be using it as a marketing piece for our Hackerspace, Ace Monster Toys. Look for me at the Bay Area Maker Faire in May. I’ll be the one with a pith helmet with a scrolling message on it.
This video shows it scrolling a pre-recorded message. However, I’ve also modified it so that it can handle all alphnumeric characters, upper and lower case, as well as punctuation. It will accept new input from the serial USB cable when connected to a 9600 baud serial terminal. Next step is to create an IRC bot and hook it up the #AceMonsterToys IRC Channel.
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First Output from my EggBot
March 26, 2011 by Sean
As a little warm-up to this year’s kick-ass Easter egg designs, I thought I should take some time to dial-in the latest addition to my robot army. The EggBot kit from Evil Mad Science was a fun assembly project and even more fun to operate.
Category Projects | Tags: , diy, microcontrollers, robots, steppers | Comments Off
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TIG Welding Workshop
March 21, 2011 by Sean
In mid-March, I took a weekend intensive TIG Welding class at the Crucible in Oakland, CA. It had been about 10 years since I had touched any welding equipment, and even then, it was wire-feed arc, which I now know is quite different from TIG. There’s a fine art to making a good looking, strong weld. I have a lot more practice ahead of me!
Category Projects | Tags: , diy | Comments Off
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It’s Pinewood Derby Season!
March 11, 2011 by Sean
I’m not going to say who’s car is who’s. I’m actually quite proud of how much effort my son put into his vehicle. Here’s to hoping we have a chance at both speed and aesthetics!
[Update 3/26/11: Added photos]
Category Projects | Tags: , woodworking | 1 Comment
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Stickers!!!
February 25, 2011 by Sean
We now have stickers for Ace Monster Toys! 501(c)3 aside, I think that makes us an official hackerspace now!?!?
Category Projects | Tags: , acemonstertoys | Comments Off
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The SEAN3000 raffle drum!
February 25, 2011 by Sean
Each year Grace Cooperative Preschool hosts a pancake breakfast with copious prizes raffled off. We have the fortunate problem of having sold too many raffle tickets to comfortably fit into the raffle drum that we normally rent. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to build a new one!
Category Projects | Tags: , diy, woodworking | Comments Off
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T1 A/B Switch – Arduino Rocks!
February 23, 2011 by Sean
The Problem
In our organization, we have an Asterisk based phone system. Because we are a 24X7 365 operation, and because our business must react quickly to customer demands, we actually have a completely redundant Asterisk system idling in standby mode. When we have to transfer over to the redundant system most of the operation takes only seconds, with one exception. Some of our inbound and outbound call traffic is carried over old school, plain ol’ telephone service (POTS) via physical T1 data circuits. In order to move these T1 circuits to the failover server, one of our engineers had to physically move the patch cables from one server to another.
Our engineers have tried a number of failover options, including converting the T1s into VoIP traffic so we could just change the packet routing when we needed to swing the calls to the failover system. However, the hardware and the software we’ve found, so far, does not meet our quality of service needs.
Category Projects | Tags: , arduino, diy, electronics, hacks | Comments Off
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Collapsible Work Tables
February 6, 2011 by Sean
No matter what I’m working on, there never seems to be enough layout space. And, since I’m quite limited on space, I thought I’d build a couple of short, boxy tables that are both sturdy and easy to collapse. I designed these to be the same height as my table saw so that they can act as run-off tables. They are also small enough (largest collapsed piece is 24″ x 48″) that I can can put them in the back seat of my VW and take them on the road.
Category Projects | Tags: , diy, woodworking | Comments Off
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Equipment furniture for our new office
January 9, 2011 by Sean
In late December my company moved its corporate office to a new larger location. However, our mailroom shrunk a bit as we planned to actually have a conference room instead of a conference/mail room. With that in mind, we needed to house a ginormous letter folding machine as well as some networking equipment into a medium sized storage room. I built these two pieces of furniture to help make that happen. The 2′ x 4′ table will be the new home to the folding machine, and the cubby looking box will become a rolling server cabinet that should fit nicely underneath the telecom wiring harness for our office.
Category Projects | Tags: , IT, woodworking | Comments Off
