Steve Cooley Fine Art

This was too cool not to repost:

I did this painting at this month’s First Friday live painting event at Works/San Jose. I’d be happy to sell it to you.

And then I’m into all kinds of new new new new stuff thanks to my training at Techshop. Here’s some acrylic test pieces. I’m over the moon on the cut quality on these. I have some fairly big ideas that I’m going to try out on this front.

Here are some larger hardboard abstracts that I’ll be sealing and painting. I’m so excited to be able to get this level of precision into my build quality. Once I paint them, I think that will be a nice combination of machine precision and human imprecision :

And then we’re working on a mobile for our coming addition to our family. Here’s the first pass at the cast of characters. I output these at 100% of the design spec, but we both agree that I can redo these and bump up the size. A lot. Although, I’m totally shocked at the fidelity to the design that the combination of the laser cutter working on the 1/4″ hardboard can reproduce. I probably just got lucky with where I put the holes and how much space I added around them.

check out the detail:

Note the circles at the white arrows. No problem at all. Every one of the holes I put into the pieces produced a clean 1/4″ thick hardboard peg. I love this machine. It’s freakin’ awesome.

Technorati Tags: art, epilog, fine art, techshop

I’ve been taking classes at Techshop this past week. Here are a couple of photos of the CNC Plasma cutter class, and the sign I made with it.

I also took two laser cutting/etching classes, TIG welding, and CNC Milling. Basically all heavy duty cutting and pasting operations.

I would highly recommend taking some classes there. The instructors are nice, and the environment is really conducive to exchanging ideas and helping each other learn. I’ll be starting up my month long membership next week! I’m very excited to get in there and get some stuff done!

Technorati Tags: cnc, cutter, epilog, laser, milling, plasma, TIG, techshop

I’ve barely had enough time after the spectacular Maker Faire to follow up on a request from Peter at CDM for more info on the screen I brought to the Chips + fish + music event in the city.

So, some history… Last year I got the crazy idea to build a projector from scratch, using an LCD screen and a 400 watt bulb. This isn’t really anything new or innovative, I used the tried and proven designs from Lumen Lab to achieve the results I had originally planned for. After the projector was built, I needed a screen to project onto. I’d already spent waaaay too much money on the project as a whole, so I needed a screen solution that would be:

• cheap cheap cheap to build
• easy to locate materials, or reuse stuff I already had
• free standing and structurally stable
• knock-down construction so I could assemble and disassemble it as my needs required.
• big when assembled
• compact when disassembled
• reusable for other purposes (more on this later)

So, with these goals in mind, here’s the solution I came up with:

materials and approximate costs:

• four “2×2″ studs, these are about 8 feet long, and cost about $2 each.
• four shelf brackets for the feet, 2 on each side. This cost can very widely, but maybe call it $4 each. This is even debatable.. you could just just whatever 90 degree brackets you have lying around. Or just run 2 or 3 screws into the bottom on the side legs into the feet and skip the brackets altogether. I ended up using two shelf brackets and two 90 degree steel brackets.
• length of PVC pipe. It’s cheap, easy to work with, and light.. sort of. – $8ish
• a little bit of hardboard for the u shaped holding things for the PVC – $free – $5 for a quarter sheet
• Various woodscrews, 8-32 machine screws, washers, and wingnuts, maybe $5 total in hardware
• a canvas tarp. I got mine from home depot along with the rest of the materials, and it has a nasty sewn seam across the middle of it. Not ideal, but again, I’d spent a bunch on everything else, so I decided I could live with a seam in my canvas screen. $10-ish
• finally, I used acrylic gesso on the tarp for two reasons. One is to fill the small gaps in the woven fabric, and two was to make the natural tan canvas closer to a white color. You could go completely bonkers on finding the right combination of primer, base coat, and reflective additives to cover your screen.. I just went with gesso. I had a bucket of it sitting right in my garage already. $optional

These construction details are more intended to be a guide than strict instructions. In fact the only major things I remember about the design decisions I made were that I’d have it be 6 feet tall, which would leave me a 2 foot long foot from an 8 foot tall 2″x2″ board. Also, I decided that I’d make the crossbar widths as big as I could to get the biggest 16:9 ration screen out of the 2×2x8 boards. So, if I have a 4 foot tall side from the top to the cross bar, that puts my width at like 7 feet 2 inches or something like that. Oh well. You get the idea. 16:9 good.

I had an extra length of PVC with a little room to spare, so I came up with the u shaped brackets to hold onto the PVC pipe off the back side of the top. It works really well, but you could probably achieve the same results with a couple of cloth straps looped and screwed into the top of the side pieces… in fact, I may end up changing it to that kind of system so that I don’t have to worry about the special shapes I cut out of hardboard breaking in transit to or from a gig. I just grabbed the edge of the tarp and screwed it into the PVC pipe with some short self tapping screws. Doesn’t have to be insanely secure, just enough to make sure it doesn’t rip apart and fall off the frame.

Lastly, I decided that I’d so with half-lap construction and use 8-32 bolts, washers, and wingnuts so that I could assemble and disassemble the frame easily and quickly. It’s all very cheap hardware, again, stuff I already had lying around. There’s very little on this design that’s “hardcoded” together, so it does break down to a small, if long, space.

Here are some more photos:

This is a detail photo of the foot construction:

Half lap joinery, at the crossbar:

8-32 bolts, big washers, and wingnuts on one of the top corners:

Here’s the canvas rolled up on the PVC and sitting in the u-shaped cradle brackets I made for this purpose:

Here it is, torn down and strapped together with some cloth straps I sewed together and used with some quick-disconnect clips. It’s leaning up against my garage door, so you may identify some of the door’s anatomical things in the photo…

and finally, here’s a rendered image of what it looks approximately like from the front when you have the screen extended to near the floor in “4:3-ish mode”… 16:9 mode can be achieved by only extending the canvas down to the crossbar.

And of course since I’m showing you 3d renders from Sketchup, you can grab the models from the 3d warehouse:
Exploded construction view and assembled view.

So far I’ve used the screen a lot at home in my garage, and taken it to a few gigs, and it’s done very well. Hopefully the design will inspire you to make a version to suit your needs. Let me know if you found this useful.

Technorati Tags: diy, LCD, make, maker faire 2007, makerfaire, makerfaire2007, projector, screen, sketchup, stevecooley

ok, so I had done this prototype design in second life, so the scale’s obviously not to life, but you can see this is a laptop +isight or other usb/firewire camera solution.

Since I can’t get my act together to build this any time soon, and since I did this design a year and a half ago, I figured I might as well put it out there since I’ve seen two new teleprompter ideas lately.

Technorati Tags: teleprompter

I love sketchup. I’m starting to use it to prototype my sculptures out before I start laying it out on real world materials. Way cool.

Technorati Tags: sketchup

I have a 17″ powerbook. When I’m on the couch, either reclining or with my feet up on the coffee table, my laptop suddenly turns into an unusable device because in order to make the keyboard egronomically comfortable, the screen wants to fall down and close. I came up with a solution as show below. I also have a Sketch Up model available on the 3d warehouse.

ok, here’s the link to the 3d warehouse sketch up file … man, that is cool what they’ve done with google and sketch up. Proper respect.

Oh, go check out my main blog Some junk we like.

Hey, Jono says that Google Sketch Up for the Mac is out!

I’ve created and uploaded a model of the workbench I’ve made 3 times for my workshop at home to the 3d warehouse. Download and create your own workbench today… for cheap!

Oh, yeah, here are the links to the 3 movies I made while making said workbenches.

http://homepage.mac.com/djcatnip/iMovieTheater24.html

http://homepage.mac.com/djcatnip/iMovieTheater18.html

http://homepage.mac.com/djcatnip/iMovieTheater27.html

I’m cited in a whitepaper about SecondLife, for my DIY headphone adapter leash… page 12, third link down from the top… along side tringo no less!

http://trumpy.cs.elon.edu/metaverse/gst364Win2005/handout.pdf

alternate download link

Technorati Tags: academia, second life

My coworkers Jon and Andrew pointed out to me last night that my phone stand could also be a really good iPod stand.

It’s actually a better fit than my Treo650. Maybe I can join the “iPod economy”

Technorati Tags: ipod, woodworking