Dash Design

I'm working on the dash for the 2011 Baja car, in last years set up the steering wheel blocks the dash making it unreadable. 

These are alternatives being explored, as well as potentially putting the dash in the steering wheel. The dash will be controlled by an arduino, receiving input from hall effect sensors in the drive train.

Laptop Woes

Christmas is approaching fast, I need to find gifts for everyone, and I have been thinking: what should I get for my best friend? You see I feel bad because I haven't been treating him very well. I don't have a case for my laptop, he just gets shoved in my backpack everyday before I head to class, the machine shop, or on some trip. For a few months I've been thinking my poor MacBook could use some TLC (Tender Loving Care that is...) How about an upgrade to Snow Leopard? Yeh, he'd like that.
He's kinda scratched up, a bit dirty, and the stickers on the front are getting tattered. This is when I started having grand ideas of making him a new case from a big block of oak... or a carbon fiber case. Ridiclous. Ok, so how about giving it a matte finish like this iPhone on Lifehacker.

So, a new finish and a new OS, what more could a 3 year old MacBook want? I will work on it over christmas, after these exams are done.

What happened when I pulled out my laptop in the library last night? Nothing. Like actually nothing... the backlight is busted. Took an extended study break to reset PRAM, PMU etc.. still no joy. Figured out that mashing the contrast up/down buttons occasionally brings it back to life. Looking at it the wrong way sends the screen back to dark depths of having no backlight. I'm writing this post in between bouts of mashing the contrast buttons. I've decided that its just easier to keep on typing when the screen goes off. People in the library are giving me weird looks. "How can he see what he's typing?"

I perused iFixit today to see what I can fix, it might be the inverter (rated "extremely difficult" to replace) or it could be a thermal fuse on the logic board (more likely). Not sure what to do, as buying a new laptop is not an option, replacing the logic board is an equally poor $400 option.

It seems that SolidSmack (An awesome blog about SolidWorks) is having a laptop give away- what are the chances?! (Truth be told... that is the reason for me taking the time to blog about this!) It's an epic looking HP workstation laptop with enough specs to make my modeling and simulating work for Queen's Baja SAE a snap. Way better than trying to run SolidWorks on parallels, OR waiting for SolidWorks to take to the cloud!

Here's a look at what I'm working on:

Good luck to everyone that enters! (But my fingers are very much crossed!)

Birthdays!

It's been 1 year since this site was born, and 21 since I was born... Happy Birthday website! It's very interesting looking at the most popular pages according to google analytics- the DTV shredder post pulled in tons of people... and a hundreds of people (well maybe tens of people) have asked me to make them headphone parts. Other popular items are the TB6560 stepper driver and the TDA2009A stereo amplifier.

Here's an idea of what I woke up to this morning:

T-Shirt Ideas

Mid physics problem, I broke out some pencil crayons and doodled some T-Shirt designs.

 These were inspired by Maker Faire NYC (wishing I was there), a play on the ubiquitous I <3 NY Tees...

Another boombox has been born!

My friend Garner has completed his own boombox, just in time for school!

Very sexy Garner, good job!

Paris in B&W

Photoset Photos taken with Nikon EM (35mm)

Zero Views

http://zeroviews.biz/ lists great youtube videos that have zero views. This one I had to share. He has the same welding mask as me...