LED Industrial Piercing

I live in a place where it didn't really take off like some regions. There are a few with some equipment, but whenever I really inquired it was kind of "we have it, but nobody can use it themselves".

I totally understand though. People don't realize how expensive precision metalworking stuff is. And that's before you start to insure the place.

For something like a really rigid CNC (not a desktop sized one or for wood), someone needs to come up with a reasonable cost machine that can hold thous and has a spindle that isn't stupidly overpriced.

I ran into the Maker Nexus booth at Maker Faire two months ago. The person I spoke to claimed that they were the successor of TechShop. I don't know if that's true, and I haven't used them, but it's worth checking out: https://www.makernexus.org/aboutus

It's unfortunate, but also not surprising. These cropped up in some of the most expensive real estate markets on the planet with no particularly good prospect for long-term sustainability.

At first, you have an influx of excited members, so it feels like you have a shot at it - but within a couple of years, most of them drop out. They either get discouraged, or they find their groove and really want the convenience and flexibility of working on their own schedule with their own tools that aren't abused by strangers.

If you want to run a Makerspace in Portland, Seattle, or in the SF Bay Area, you better have an endowment from a wealthy donor, a long-term government grant, or something of that sort.

covid blow + capital costs on real estate has increased 3x over last year or so. it's expected.

It's global. Hacker spaces as a pay per use venue never made a financial sense. It's membership only coffee shop that caters to an ultra niche group, but can't charge the proportionately exorbitant amount that corresponds to the nicheness.

Tampa must be an exception. They’ve quadrupled the size of their space in the past few years, expanding into every adjacent unit in the building. It’s probably about 10,000 ft^2 now and still only $50/mo. Obviously rent is cheaper here.

It's definitely more than just SF.

Up here in Portland (well really the western suburbs) we had a rather ambitious TechShop start up about a decade and a half ago, but they didn't last a year. I made a decent sized donation at the start because I liked what they were doing, and took some great classes there on woodworking and CNC. The woodworking instructor in particular was really interesting as he was an old school pattern maker (patterns for casting) which involves different techniques than finish or furniture carpentry. He could build to 1/64" tolerances by using various combinations of sanders, including a stationary disc sander with a 1 yard diameter. That thing was a pretty cool piece of equipment.

Unfortunately I'm sad to say besides the finances they had some cultural issues. A few of the instructors went pretty heavy on the "boys club" style humor in a way that would clearly alienate a lot of women.

100% they're just not a profitable business

It's definitely happening across swaths of the US. Maker spaces have high positive externalities but low margins and require a lot of work and upkeep. With rent prices shooting through the roof and redevelopment taking cheap shop space offline maker spaces are getting squeezed out.

I find it heartbreaking but it seems inevitable. Not a lot of people want to keep an old building available for rent when they can sell the property for redevelopment into "luxury" apartments or condos.

I loved TechShop while it lasted, it was so great. They were two blocks away from me, I could treat it almost like "my shop", just walking over to do small tasks as I worked around the house.

But as others noted, it is not an attractive business. High fixed costs, you're significantly more optional than gym subscriptions to many people, and your best customers naturally tend to graduate to owning their own.

Omni Commons in Oakland is at a critical juncture in its history and we may lose the building in 2024. I was just at a rather passionate three hour meeting about it yesterday.

And then there was American Steel…

You’re not imagining things. It’s hard to sustain places like this when private equity firms are buying up all the land to build high end apartments.

Seems like everything in the bay area is shutting down, no?

Yeah, the London Hackspace lost their building as it was being demolished for new development in the area. They're currently trying to rebuild in a temporary location in Park Royal for anyone interested: https://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/view/London_Hackspace

Usually starts with "this can't be THAT hard to add this to my project, let's try it". Six months later you've got a solid working knowledge of running a lathe and you've started teaching workshops to other hackerspace folk on how to run it because everyone has seen you running that machine and needs help on it. Then you realize you forgot to finish the project that sent you down this road in the first place. You get bored and stop using the lathe for a few months. "Hey, it can't be that hard to design a PCB for this project, lets do some of that now..." Six months later you're teaching workshops on it...

And then years down the road you know how to make most things from scratch from the electronics design, PCB gerbers, and the enclosure both in metal (both machined and fabricated), laser cut, and 3D printed. But just conjuring up any cool thing you want to make summons a mental spreadsheet of the time it will take to complete the project, possibly including making a small-run of extras to sell for much less than your time is worth, and then you set your drink back down and shake your head because ain't no one got time for that any more. And then you buy the Etsy/Kickstarter version instead because you realize they have woefully underpriced their super cool widget.

With KiCAD and dirt-cheap PCB manufacturing, the PCB design is just a matter of starting with something simple. It took me a (long) evening to go from nothing to an VGA I2C Atari joystick controller board. [1]

Once you've got the hang of it, more complex PCBs aren't really that much different.

I started with double-sized PCBs, but 4-layer PCBs are now almost equally cheap, which makes routing a lot easier too.

[1] https://tomverbeure.github.io/2019/02/05/VGA-I2C-My-First-PC...

You don't need a certification that attests your knowledge on the labor market when you are doing something as a hobby. I know it sounds weird, but you can just do it and fail and repeat until you can.

The hardest part by far is figuring out what you want to do. Even if you think you want to do a hundred different things and you can't do them all, you still have to figure out what you want to do.

Regarding machining, you can/should read a lot of books but you're not going to learn how to run a mill or a lathe without getting your hands on one.

I took engineering tech and welding classes at my local community college as a non-matriculated student.

Lots of entry points, but the best way is to just start a project that’s simple and learn as you go. Electronics have gotten pretty accessible with arduinos, rpi, circuitpython boards etc. machining does take shop time to learn. Friends, maker spaces, school shops, all are options but that’s hard. Sometimes you don’t need much to get going.

A screen requires a loooot more grunt than this microprocessor, not to mention a lot more battery power and supporting components.

At best you could probably do a small low-res (8x8?) LED matrix with some programmed patterns but even that would require more batteries etc than this and get exponentially heavier.

You just gotta gauge your lobes out enough to fit a smartwatch.

By coincidence, I found out about him through the “Smallest USB-C MIDI Synth” on Youtube just today.

I bought and built the clock kit, it's great!

Some smartwatches/fitness trackers have had the battery in the band - such as the Microsoft Band.

It seemed to result in a fairly thick and inflexible strap, with limited length adjustment. It was generally panned by reviewers for its bulk, although a microsoft-loving large-wristed friend of mine reported it was just fine.

Batteries are heavy, it'd whip around your ear. As someone who used to have an industrial, I can't imagine it'd be comfortable.

Ironically it gives me late '90s vibes, there was some tech (mostly for the cool factor?) where you could import basic 3D objects into web pages and perform like basic rotations.

I feel like it may have been like some XML format (VRML?), but I may be misremembering and it may have just been Java applets...

yeah, I was really impressed too. using three.js and .wrl files (vrml I guess, hello again 01994)

the one-finger orbit and 2-finger pan and zoom was fantastic and intuitively obvious. with a mouse it's left-button orbit, right-button pan, and mousewheel zoom, which is not as immediately obvious but still pretty usable

https://mitxela.com/other/3d/loader.js?2

view-source:https://mitxela.com/img/uploads/metal/scaffold/scaffold-case...

incidentally meshlab knows how to open .wrl files, and the loader on this page also supports .stl

surprisingly, this is not a hack of modelviewer.dev, though it uses the same tag name and underlying 3-d library. it supports different model formats and is an independent effort. https://mitxela.com/projects/model-viewer is a page from last month by jacobs about it

no license visible tho, which is a shame because it's awesome and i'd like to be able to use it. still, not that hard to reimplement i guess? now that jacobs has done all the hard and non-copyrightable work of figuring out what kind of user interface and programming interface works best for this

He used syringe, presumably medical one.

3 mA doesn't seem terribly far from the ballpark for always-on LEDs, even PWM-ed. The battery choice is kind of peculiar, though. A hearing aid battery with a small boost converter for the LEDs should give you several days of power per battery, and is about the same size as the battery used here.

Johnny Mnemonic: These can smuggle data, surveillance, etc.

It will be an interesting world when Sneaker Nets are the safest smuggle.