Permission and Success!

I got permission from the folks at the Gemini Observatory to use one of my aerial photos of Gemini North commercially. Rights extend only as far as selling individual prints, and there's a stipulation that the image not be used to endorse any product, or for commercial licensing. But hey, I got to list a print of Gemini North on Etsy! I'm stoked. (Big BIG mahalos to the Gemini folks!)

I also had a really successful 4x5 KAP trip to Pololu Valley. Not all the pictures came out, unfortunately, and at one point I thought I was taking a picture of the beach and actually took a face-on picture of the cliff instead. DOH!

But some of the pictures did come out. There was severe tilt in one of them, though, to the tune of about 14.5 degrees. So I'm going to have to bail on the eye bolts I'm currently using on the 4x5 KAP Picavet in favor of building out some honest-to-goodness ball bearing pulleys. I've got the pulleys in-hand (salvaged from a Tektronix plotter of yesteryear) and just need to make the pulley blocks. It's about a two hour job on the mill at work, so I'll probably do it there rather than at home.

Things seem to have slowed WAY way down on Etsy, so I may re-list a bunch of stuff after I get the shots from Pololu worked out. Maybe that's not the best venue for what I'm doing. I did hand out two business cards when I was down in Pololu, but I think it's time to put together a portfolio and try some of the shops in town.

Speaking of Pololu, Jan sent me a new Baby-Orangutan, one that uses a much higher capacity and lower-loss H-bridge chip than the original. It's also wired up like the 168-LV, so hardware PWM can be used in both directions with or without braking. It's a HUGE move forward for micro robots. I'm going to try to get Ben's 168-LV motor code rolled into the library this week.

I also approached Jan about building an AVR-only board with all the I/O pins brought out to 3-pin headers. This would be great for AutoKAP controllers, for sensor filters (like Billy's massive Kalman filter for his 6DOF+GPS+Compass system), for the ThereminVisionII system... the list really goes on and on. Heck, I'd order two right now!

And finally, Jan got new gear motors in. One of them looks like it'd be well-suited to mini-sumo, and should triple the robot's speed over a conventional servo-based mini-sumo while losing none of the pushing ability. So that project is going to start ramping up in the near future.

So this may be one of my last photography-only posts for a while. Other irons in the fire just got hot, and it's time to get back to the other parts of The Tiny Machine Shop.

Tom