Playing with the DJI Phantom 2 Vision Plus at the DMSC Potluck last night.

Went to the Denver Mini Maker Faire this weekend with the Denver Mad Scientist Club. We had a pretty good size booth. Bill Llewellyn brought out the bicycle powered air gun. John Morse was representing the Critter Crunch and had the reigning champion Fang on hand. There were some impromtu matches from some of the Loveland Robotics club folks (aka The Tick). Dale brought a bunch of kids from the Open School in Denver and they had a  Monkey Physics display in which they were shooting a monkey dropped by an elctromagnet with a tennis ball fired from an air cannon. The magnet was triggered to drop the monkey as the trigger was fired on the air cannon. So there was some tricky timing involed. Mike Miller was present with his Delta Bot 3D printer and he also brought a Jacobs ladder and VanDeGraaf generator which were hugely popular. People were zapping each other left, right, and center. Someone maybe Mike brought a plasma globe as well.  Jay Bohmer, Robert Racansky, Dan Kuckes and my wife Melva were on hand helping out with all the displays.

I brought the Hexacopter for display as well as a 3D printer and 3D scanner. The idea was to 3D scan people and print them out. We did about 37 or so 3D scans of people with an Asus Xtion Live Pro and a copy of Reconstructme. It was pretty succesful though I did not get everything working on that until Sunday. I was also able to 3D scan and print some of the DMSC folks that were there.

A big thank you to everyone that helped out.

Here are some picture from the event

Here is a picture of the 3D scanning setup

Here is the rouges gallery of Mad Scientists

Here is Mike with Mini Mike

And Dale with Mini Dale

John with Mini John

And Bill with Mini Bill

And Me with Mini Me 

And here is the whole DMSC Denver Mini Maker Faire gang next to a cool Land Speeder display. May the Forth be with you!

One of the kids we did a 3D scan for went home and printed his out on his own 3D printer he sent me a pic. Very cool!

Just a quick update on an improvement I have made on the lathe. 

I have gotten rid of the compound and replaced it with a solid steel block as a compound is superfluous on a CNC lathe and only serves to make things less rigid at this point. Here are some pictures of that.

Here is a short video I made about the lathe.

Well I have been working quite dilligently on my CNC lathe conversion project it is actually done now. I will be slowly adding pics and videos from the project. Here are some pics of the spindle work.

Testing the new 2HP motor and Hitachi sensorless vector drive on the bench /table saw.

New motor and VFD installed on the lathe

Index wheel cut on the Epilog laser cutter with optical sensor and bracket to read it.

More to come