Author Archives: Steven Smethurst

The Giant Claw Game! – The Controls System

Only two weeks left to get the Claw up and running ready for Breaker Faire the Maker Faire fund raiser party. I am starting to get worried that I might not get it done in time. I have been having lots of problems this week with getting the motors working with the gantry system. The motors are [...]

The Giant Claw Game! – The Gantry System

This week I have working on the gantry system. The gantry system is used to move the claw around inside the Cube. I was originally planing on attaching the claw to 4 cables running to pulleys in each of the corners of the cube. The cables would be attached to four electric motors. Just like the sky cam that you can [...]

The Giant Claw Game! – The Claw, Prototype 3

I started working on the third version of the claw this week. In this version I have added a motor, extended the length of the prongs, and started on the electronics. At first I tried using a direct drive electric motor that I found at VHS. I constructed my own shaft coupler out of sheet metal and hotglue. It [...]

The Giant Claw Game! – Controller

Continuing from my last post on The Giant Claw Game! This week I build the controller for the Giant Claw using the laser cutter, a arcade joystick and a button. The box was cut with VHS’s laser cutter, using a pattern that I created with this laser cutting box making tool. I purchased the joystick and button from a local arcade suppler John’s [...]

The Giant Claw Game! – Vancouver Maker Faire 2013 project

This year for the Vancouver Maker Faire I am planning on making a giant Claw Crane game.  Normally claw games are found in video arcades and shopping malls and are a glass box where players can control a crane with a joystick and attempt to pick up prizes from the playing area. They are also known as teddy picker, candy crane, [...]

Space ship mobile

One of my good friends just had a child and I wanted to get them a hand made gift. I decided on making a mobile with VHS’s laser cutter. The first version I designed while at VHS one night.   I changed a few things in Version two. I added more rings, designed in holes [...]

Raspberry PI controlling an Arduino via the pyfirmata protocol

The Raspberry PI is good for a lot of things from computer clusters to home automation but its missing a few things such as a real time clock, terminal/barrel power connector, or  Analog pins.  The Arduino has analog pins that can be read by the USB virtual serial port from the Raspberry PI. In MagPI issue 7, has a great article on [...]

Raspberry PI and the GPIO pins

This week I have been playing with the Rapberry PI, Python and the Python GPIO pins library. Software I started by formatting a SD Card with the Raspbian “wheezy” (2012-12-16) image from Raspberry PI’s website. I followed this tutorial on how to set up the Raspberry PI for the first time. I then enabled SSH so I don’t have to attache a monitor, keyboard [...]

Working with Open Data, Maps and data.gov.bc.ca

This weekend I have been playing with more Open Data and Maps using TileMill. Specifically I been trying to make a Bathymetric map of the Salish Sea (BC Coastal waters) A bathymetric chart is the submerged equivalent of an above-water topographic map. Bathymetric charts are designed to present accurate, measurable description and visual presentation of the submerged terrain. In an ideal case, [...]

2013 Goals and Resolutions

Goals and Resolutions for 2013 (In no particular order) Create a new post for ABlueStar.com (This blog) each week. – Last year I only missed a few weeks and created a total of a ~47 post. Learn Ruby on Rails using Heroku. Currently all my web projects are created with JavaScript and PHP. While there is nothing [...]

The Noun Project – Laser cutter Tips, tricks and resources

About a year ago I found the The Noun Project while looking for some icons for a project and was instantly hooked. They provide a website where you can enter in any “Noun” and get a iconic image. The Noun Project is building a global visual language that everyone can understand. Visually communicating with symbols is incredibly powerful. It’s no [...]

Laser safe font – Laser cutter Tips, tricks and resources

A few of my recent laser cutter projects, have required that I cut some text out of the material. When you cut in to the material using normal font like Arial or Helvetica, the center parts of letters such as “O” and “P” fallout and looks horrible. The inner parts of the font is called “counters“. In typography, [...]