Designing gears, cogs, sprockets in illustrator for laser cutting

I really enjoy building mechanical movements, and I am terrible at it. It is really difficult to build things that move without relying on expensive pre-built mechanisms. Thus I am always looking for cheap ways to design and build cogs, gears, and sprockets.

Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Challenge

I just got back from the Sparkfun AVC. It was a blast! I shot a lot of video, but that will take a while to get processed edited and uploaded. In the meantime here are the things I thought were cool on the ‘factory tour’ with a few AVC shots thrown in. This pond instill …

CD robot V 2.0! Adding serial control to an old scsi cd duplicator.

My newest project involves reincarnating a very old (1998) cd duplicating robot. It is a DTP-1000 that was originally SCSI only. Due to the fates smiling down upon me I was able to pick it up on ebay for $11. I bought it intending to put an arduino in the place of the control board …