Monthly Archives: November 2012

CNC Laser Light Painting

Posted by on November 28, 2012 4 comments

laser-pacmanSo what do you get when you combine lasers with a CNC router?  More CNC light painting, except this time it can be projected on a distant surface.  The laser can be projected anywhere, and thus create a light painting remotely.

As in my originial CNC light painting experiments, a light source, now a laser, is attached to the router’s spindle then moved around corresponding to a drawing.  This uses GCODE as if it were cutting something.  The Y and Z axes are reversed so the drawing is put on a vertical surface instead of the router bed.  If you’re wondering how to do this with Mach3, here’s a tutorial I made up for this purpose.

I don’t yet have a cutoff switch as with the LED setup, but this may come soon enough if I keep playing with it (which seems likely).  I also have another completely different idea for how to do this.  For now though, check out the pictures of some simple drawings I did on my car and my Read more »

How to Replace Your Antique Lathe Belt (and Several Ways Not to)

Posted by on November 25, 2012 1 comment

Without any background, if you have an old belt-driven piece of equipment, a link belt (Available from Amazon) works really really well.  Especially if the belt can’t be continuous, this is a great solution.  Here’s a video of me putting one of these belts together in a trial.

As for how I came to the conclusion that the link belt really worked well compared to other methods, and some more videos and pictures, read on… Read more »

JcoPro Youtube Channel – Robots, Stop Motion, CNC, and Whatever Else I Come Up With!

Posted by on November 21, 2012 No comments

If you haven’t seen it yet, all of the embedded videos found here can also be found in one place on my Youtube Channel.  There are now over 100 videos, and many of them have a link to the source JcoPro article, so it’s a good way to see what I have up.  Here’s a stop-motion animation video that I made well over a year ago, but there’s lots more stuff that you may not have seen yet, so be sure to check the channel out, and subscribe if you like what you see!

As you may have noticed, I’ve been posting around 2 times a week instead of 3.  I was having a hard time keeping up with 3 a week, while still having enough time to put into the projects that I write about.  Most of the time, the stuff I’m working on will be on Youtube before it’s here if you want a preview of what I’m working on!

How to Make a Stop-Motion Video in Ubuntu Linux

Posted by on November 14, 2012 1 comment

This would also apply to time-lapse videos.  As I use Ubuntu now, my stop-motion technique of creating animated GIFs in GIMP, then importing them into Windows Movie Maker is no longer an option.  This feature doesn’t seem to exist in Windows 7 either, so a new solution had to be found.  Here’s a stop-motion video of me trying to tie a monkey’s fist knot using Openshot Video Editor in Ubuntu to combine the shots:

The video is kind of a cross between a stop-motion and time-lapse as I wasn’t using an intervalometer (here’s some from Amazon if you’re wondering what that is) to time the shots.  Combining the photos into a video was done without GIMP.  The photos were imported into Openshot, Read more »