The laser has basically sat in my tiny apartment for the last three years in Los Angeles. Now that I’ve left my job for graduate school, I finally have the time and space to work on the laser again. The laser is nearing completion and a few big things have changed since the last time I worked on it.

Holy smokes! Working motion control on my laser with the Smoothieboard! Click through, there is a video.

Magnetic door interlock switch! this stops the laser from burning your eyeballs out when you open the door. It’s also a required piece of equipment for a class 4 laser. This is an update on my laser.

Inspired by the Paulding Hammer my friend Michael and I decided it would be a fun project to make our own machinist’s hammers. Here I’ll cover the design and manufacturing plan.

Someone across the street from my apartment left out this perfectly awesome rear projection TV with a “bad bulb”. After it sat there for about a week, I decided to haul it over to my place and take it apart. Old products are a goldmine of random interesting parts, and a great opportunity to take a look at design and manufacturing.

My final project for my Mechatronics course at Cal Poly. We (myself and Colton Crivelli) had to build an Nerf gun that could autonomously find and shoot an incandescent bulb mounted to a square piece of wood. The project was titled “Learn by Duelling” since our turrets would compete against each other in duels, and Cal Poly’s motto is “Learn by Doing” (hardy har har).