Handheld CNC? Awesome!

Ben over at Applied Science (you should check out his channel, he does a lot of cool stuff) has gotten a hold of a handheld CNC machine from Shaper Tools.

Basically this is a handheld cutter that you move around with your hands, neat enough, I have got one of those myself and use it every now and then, and it is really handy. But the one Ben has got is extremely awesome, because it also has camera controlled CNC capabilities that "auto-corrects" your hand movements! Tool snags on something while you are moving it? Mine would do a wrong cut, and I would have to start over... This one however, just quickly corrects the position of cutter and continues on! Excellent! Have a look at Ben's video:

A Falcon is standing around, and all the engineers are cheering!

Wohooo! They did it!

SpaceX landed a Falcon first stage on one of their drone ships successfully. This is great news, and my warmest congratulations to the SpaceX team and Elon Musk for achieving this milestone. They also tweeted this really cool clip from somewhere fairly high up on the rocket, where you can see the "wings" moving to position the rocket and the landing legs extending. Really cool!

Onboard view of landing in high winds pic.twitter.com/FedRzjYYyQ

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) 9. april 2016

I have tweeted a question to SpaceX, and if I do get a reply I will share it with you here. The question was, what happens after the Falcon lands? Is it secured in a vertical position and then transported to land, or is it somehow lowered to a horizontal position for the transport? What tickled my curiosity was that in the topmost video you can clearly see the waves affecting the drone ship after landing, and the Falcon is noticeably tilted by it, so they have to do something before transport. And since it is a drone ship, there is no crew to do stuff, which means that most likely it will be an automated process, which is really interesting!

DIY 3D-printed wall mounts - part 5

It was a good thing that I went way overboard with regards to length of the clip last time I recorded. This has allowed me to just edit the length of the clip for this week, which is great since I have had a worsening cold since easter and would not have had the time or energy to record anything this week. But here is a clip for you anyway, it is time to start refining the rough designs!

Next week will see some more refining, and after that I believe I will test out some simulation app in Onshape to do some Finite Element Analysis of the wall mount, just for fun!

A few seconds of fame!

One of the national Norwegian tabloid newspapers, VG, decided to do a piece this easter about the Norwegian "oil crisis", that is to say the effect the massive drop in oil price has had on the oil and gas industry here in Norway. They decided to do interviews with ten affected people. While looking for people to interview, they asked NITO Nord-Rogaland og Sunnhordaland, the local branch of NITO (The Norwegian Society of Engineers and Technologists) that I belong to. Since I did the opening ten minutes of an event they were participating in a few weeks back (see the "Public appearance" post), they named me as a candidate to the journalist. And suddenly, on Monday 21st, I saw this in the newspaper:

And a buddy of mine linked this to me. Both of the pieces are in Norwegian, but the gist of them is that I have been affected by the "oil crisis" by being placed on a forced leave of absence (basically temporarily losing my job and becoming eligible for social support) from Imenco AS, and that in the meantime I have found temporary work as a lecturer at Stord/Haugesund University College. It also delves into the emotional turmoil you experience in such a situation.

So without actually intending it, I ended up with a few seconds of fame while enjoying the ski resort and cross-country skiing opportunities in Hovden, Norway, this easter.

I will be back next with the next part of my 3D-print project.

DIY 3D-printed wall mounts - part 4

The lid has arrived... I got really carried away with the screen recording this time. Before I knew it, I had made the lid and refined the design of both the lid and the wall mount! And had made a clip clocking in at more than 50 minutes... Luckily, Youtube has a nifty editing tool, so for this part of the project I edited the clip to be only the first 8 minutes, where I create the lid that goes on the wall mount. Enjoy!