from : via

Controlled by Arduino, with tutorial etc on the site.

A slightly more together looking variant here:

Machine generations.

Something I’m noticing myself now that I’m getting away (hah) from programming and more into physical stuff… the prototype is generally corrugated cardboard, wood, hacked-acrylic… what the likes of Ponoko do is reduce the gulf between “hacked proof-of-concept” to “work of art” to…

…, an evening in front of a graphics program.

What Ponoko do is reduce massively reduce the energy that is required for the Second Machine Generation.

What I’d really love for them to be able to do (do you hear this Ponoko folk?) is a same-day turnaround.

I can remember when mail-order had a standard 28 day delivery time, then Amazon was invented and destroyed that model… in the UK I’ve ordered a book from Amazon and had it in my mailbox the next morning. Ebay took up this approach, and now we kindof expect more or less instant delivery. This would be really useful for Ponoko to be able to do, because there’s an experiment-cycle. Try->fail, try->fail, try->fail, try->succeed. This can take months.

So um… the core-value that I’m getting from Ponoko is the massive attenuation of the Concept->Art process. If they want to improve their service (to Me me me) then a big thing they could do is figure a way to radically lower the turnaround time.

But I don’t know their business, or what’s involved, or if this is a reasonable thing to suggest etc… If I were to buy my own laser-cutter though, that’s the reason I’d do it. To reduce the Concept->Art process. That’s what this stuff is for. De-Sublimation.

Anyway, back to the CNC…

These are starting to show up around the place quite a bit… eg: buildyourcnc.com, but nothing quite as cheap as the one above.

Which looks like some sort of beautiful deep-see worm from The Abyss, or a fascimile of one of those weird Chinese dogs that mad old ladies have made out of space-age medical equipment.

It is, a microfluidic chip capable of performing 1024 (or is that 1023?) experiments at the same time. Brilliant.

There’s been a lot of talk on the DIYbio list about Sharpie-Microfluidics (“Sharpie” being American for “pen”, or maybe “one of those felt-tipped pens with the pointy ends”, but to me it sounds Australian, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The Australians have a take on the English language that is disarmmingly direct, and I love it dearly

And I digress – apparently you can draw the microfluidic shape you want directly onto glass and it behaves just like a mega-bucks version.

Maybe there should be a word for the conversion of high-science to low (or at least, more democratically-dispensed) science. De-sublimation. It’s like turning gold into lead, but in a good way.