BioGraph goes Open Source
After more than five years in commercial development, Spiral Genetics has released version 7 of our BioGraph genomic analysis platform….
Spiders, spinnerets, spigots, and silk
I’ve seen many fascinating things under the scanning electron microscope. Pollen, various crystals, diatoms, and even viral particles. But nothing…
SEM beam alignment: The Happy Place
Aligning Milly’s electron beam is tricky business. It’s a process involving hours (or even days!) of pain and uncertainty that…
Ain’t no party like a SEM party
’cause a SEM party got diatoms. More in the Google Photo album.
Pollen
Enjoy some random pollen samples. Lily pollen, ~750xLily pollen, 2300xForget-me-not and other (larger) random pollen for scale, ~1100xForget-me-not pollen, ~20,000xForget-me-not…
Porcelain, Tungsten, and other yaks
Yak shaving : Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a…
The Move
As the manifesto says: If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it. But you don’t truly appreciate how much…
Toorcamp 2018
Here’s the talk I gave at Toorcamp 2018 on making an FEG electron emitter.
2017: Year in Review
Looks like I haven’t made a lot of time for blogging this year. I’ve been too busy taking photos with…
Experiments in nano manufacturing
There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. –Richard Feynman With the recent demise of Milly’s electron emitter, I attempted to…
New Year, New Emitter
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men…
Look into my eyes
What color are your eyes? There are many ways to answer that question. Statistically speaking, they’re probably brown. Unless you’re…
My genome: Let me show you it
tl;dr: download Rob’s source code In October 2015 I signed up as a beta tester for Arivale, a Seattle-based “scientific wellness” company….
Shrinking on battery power
Remember the hockey puck of doom that powers the Tesla Gun? It’s a ZVS driver (also called a Royer oscillator) that…
The Quarter Shrinker returns
Back in 2009, I was one of several folks that built the coin shrinker at Hackerbot Labs. After several hundred firings…
Soda as a dietary supplement
Last year I signed up for Arivale’s beta program. They’re attempting to quantify participants’ state of health through DNA sequencing, gut microbiome…
AmScope upgrades
I designed a 3D-printable eyepiece holder that mates a Raspberry Pi camera to a popular inexpensive stereo inspection scope. This lets me send…
Happiness is an aligned electron beam
Back in business. What should I look at next?
SEM back online
A couple of months ago, Milly started having beam issues. At the time it seemed like emitter trouble. New emitter modules…
Cheap digital optical microscope
I recently picked up an AmScope SE400Z inspection scope. It’s a handy desktop microscope that sells for under $200. The…
Etching tungsten
Electroetching a recrystallized tungsten wire in 2.5 molar sodium hydroxide solution. The cathode is a hunk of highly ordered pyrolytic…
Puss in Boots
Crouching tiger, hidden Walken. Hypnotic, isn’t it? If you’ve never seen Christopher Walken in Puss in…
All that glitters…
Gold particles on carbon at x50,000 Here’s an image of a gold calibration target. To give…
Megapixel images from an analog SEM
I recently posted my first batch of photos from Milly. While I am happy with her beam performance, I was…
Big SEM: online
I recently got Milly the big SEM online. She had a ton off issues that I’ll chronicle in future posts….
Laser HV repair
I’m in the process of upgrading the brain in the laser from a cheap (and recently deceased) Chinese special to…
Tomorrow we bake
Milly is coming along nicely. I believe we’re over the vacuum difficulties. She’s buzzing along at a nice deep vacuum in…
Milly’s computer is happy again
Reconnect the broken black wire, and away we go! After several days of looking, the cause…
Robots all the way down
Laser robot making wooden robots for an aluminum robot that makes brass robots… #slavetothemachines
Happy New Year, Mr. Lincoln
SEM FTW: Meryl lives again
Happy Holidays! Here is a 2mm stainless steel screw. It’s sitting on a standard, non-shrunken quarter for scale. The finished…
Machining brass
Today was cncbot’s big day: machining brass sheet! Proof in plywood: Brass in process: Ready for extraction: I’ll post…
Memento Mori
(Warning: graphic toothiness ahead) I recently had a couple of wisdom teeth removed. Bottoms. One a horizontal impaction, the other…
Tesla gun upgrades
I finally got around to making a couple of much needed upgrades to the Tesla gun. First: a trigger! I…
DIY Laser part 3: The Muscle
The gantry is the part of a CNC robot that puts a tool just where it needs to be to get…
DIY Laser part 2: The Skin
It’s a common misconception that low-powered CO2 lasers can’t cut through metal. But in the right circumstances, you can cut…
DIY Laser part 1: The Bones
There’s no such thing as a cheap laser engraver. Though you might think otherwise if you’re like many DIY types,…
Laser upgrade: in progress
Going from 40 to 60 Watts means (almost) doubling the tube length! Google+: View post on Google+
I spent the last six weeks making my first CNC project: a 40 Watt CO2 laser!
I spent the last six weeks making my first CNC project: a 40 Watt CO2 laser! It was based on…
The Tesla Gun: a history
Staci Elaan is an electrical engineer who has been making Tesla guns since 2006. Her sixth generation MK6-18V is a…
Tesla Gun on Discovery Canada
Santa brought me an early present this year: Discovery Canada (the same folks that covered the quarter shrinker a while…
PopSci feature: with video!
Popular Science has published the online version of the print article on the Tesla Gun! It includes a quick (and…
Toorcamp on Forbes
Guess who made the lede for Forbes’ coverage of Toorcamp! I certainly wouldn’t want to mess with this gang. Particularly…
DIY Backyard Genius
The Tesla Gun was chosen to be the opening project of the 2012 Popular Mechanics DIY Backyard Genius awards! PopMech hasn’t updated…
Electronics at Work – 1943
They Rectify! Amplify! Generate! Control! And Transform Light to Electricity and Back Again! They’re Winning The War!
Ready for Maker Faire
I’ll be at Seattle Maker Faire today at 3:45 to show off the Tesla Gun. Hope to see you there!
Tesla Gun video
Ask, and ye shall receive lightning. For best results, choose 720p. Enjoy!
The Tesla Gun
The year was 1889. The War of the Currents was well underway. At stake: the future of electrical power distribution…
Time to reboot
I’m going to try to merge my (private) project wiki with the public blog. This calls for a new spark-o-licious…
Swedish pulse jet sleds
I haven’t had time for an update in a while. But great things are afoot. So in the meantime I…
Quarter Shrinker on Discovery Canada
Pip and I were featured on Discovery Canada’s Daily Planet: Inventors. We showed off the quarter shrinker at Hackerbot Labs….
Talk at Ada’s: The Tesla gun
I gave another talk at Ada’s Technical Books: this time about the (nearly completed) Tesla gun. The audio isn’t perfect,…
Happy New Year!
What better way to ring in the new year than with a 3d photobooth that auto-posts to Flickr? May your…
Happy HV Holidays!
To celebrate the season this year, I got together with some friends to make gingerbread houses. My contribution: Gingerbread Wardenclyffe,…
Porcelain HV switch
After tragically melting my previous HV switch, and given that a 15kV multi-ampere switch isn’t exactly something you find at…
The rheology and thixotrophy of slip slurries
Here’s a great article on the importance of deflocculants and specific gravity in maintaining your slip suspensions. A more modest…
Ten years of Pringles cans
A friend pointed out that it’s been ten years this month since I wrote an article about a particularly infamous…
Mini coil progress
I’ve made a little progress with the mini-coil. I have two flyback drivers up and running. Each circuit fits nicely…
Resonance
I’m working on a small Tesla coil project. After hours of winding and letting the polyurethane cure, there’s nothing quite…
Bytecoins!
I scored 15 bytecoins at Metrix CreateSpace yesterday. What are they worth? Well, I’ll tell you what I paid for…
DIY LN2
Here’s a very nicely done DIY liquid nitrogen generator from Ben Krasnow, the guy who brought you the DIY scanning…
Bullet time lightning
A while back, I took some photos of my spark gap Tesla coil running. Although I did get some nice…
MakerSlide Kickstarter
Barton Dring (of Buildlog DIY laser cutter fame) is holding a Kickstarter for an Open Source linear bearing system. This should…
Laser upgrades
Back when we opened our workshop, one of our members went nuts and bought a $4000 laser engraver for the…
DIY scanning electron microscope
Check out this amazing SEM build. It’s beautifully made and well filmed. Can’t wait for the follow-up posts!
Lightning
I finally got around to taking a few photos of my spark gap Tesla coil in action. It smelled like…
Wolfram’s Captcha
I just registered for online access to Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. As a regular user of Wolfram Alpha, I find…
Plasma ball ornaments
Caroline Wurden of Los Alamos High School demonstrates making ball lightning in her garage. As Focus Fusion points out, the results…
HOWTO grow your own snowflakes
This fun HOWTO from Caltech shows you how to grow your own snowflakes at home with a coke bottle, a…
First-ever live birth inside an MRI
Philips designed an open MRI that allows enough room for the mother to actually give birth while inside the machine….
An Introduction to High-Magnification Macro Photography
Phenomenal macro photos of various spiders, flies, and other insects. Watch in HD for full spider creep-out effect. Via Alex…
The Periodic Table of Videos
Curious about a particular element? Check out the Periodic Table of Videos: a collection of short vids about each element,…
Trigatrons are in!
My trigatrons have finally arrived. According to the datasheet, they’ll switch about 160 kW at up to 10 kV (7.2…
Alchemy
(WARNING: spoilers ahead!) Alchemy is a fun little grind game for Android. The premise is simple. You start with four…
My new “business” cards are in
I just got a new set of Moo cards, and boy are they sexy. Now with 106% more AWESOME!
Cell Phone Spectrometer
(or, A Guided Inquiry Approach to Teaching How to Think About Analytical Instrumentation.) Wired has a great article about a scientist…
Citizen Science Badge
Who needs a post graduate degree when you can do Citizen Science! (One of the many fantastic bits of flare…
HOWTO make an Ultra High Vacuum
Who thought it would take so much work to make nothing at all? http://www.cae2k.com/howto.html
Happy 10/10/10
Celebrate Improbability Day (10/10/10, or 101010, or 42, depending on how you look at it) by doing something improbable. I…
Talk at Ada’s Technical: success!
The talk went very well. There was much animated discussion, and electrical zapping was had by all. Thank you Ada’s…
Speaking at Ada’s Technical Books this Sunday!
I’m very excited to be speaking at Ada’s Technical Books on Capitol Hill this Sunday 9/19, from 4:00-6:00pm. I’ll show…
Scoring a dewar from the U.W.
My buddy yoyojedi got quite the score at the last U.W. public auction: a 35 liter dewar, for only $150!…
Bussard on polywell fusion
Here is the classic Google Tech Talk from Robert Bussard (yes, the ramjet guy). In it he talks about a…
Server room
We built a server / laser cutter room to contain the noise. Watch us build it in 45 seconds! Highlights:…
Adventures with Eagle
Thanks to my extremely encouraging dad, I’ve been building circuits since I was seven years old. Freehanding a breakout board…