Tuesday, June 18, 2013

'Tango Dancers' film for Mr. Plastimime


Here's the fifth webisode of the Behind The Scenes series I've been shooting/editing at TANDEM in support of Daniel Greaves' Mr. Plastimime project.

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

More Adventures in CAD

For the last few weeks, I've been getting to grips with a trial version of Geomagic Design (formerly known as Alibre).

This is a CAD package that goes a lot further than the free Autodesk 123D Design I've been using previously. The main advantage seems to be the parametric structure to the programme which allows each part to have a complete history of non-destructive changes. Parts are initially designed separately, then brought  together to create an assembly. There are lots of alignment and constraint tools available to do this to a high degree of accuracy.
 
My plan is to at least learn at least enough CAD to be able to draft my projects and have them 3D printed from time to time. Here we see a plan for a very simple (and probably somewhat naive) device to help me digitize 8mm movie film. I've been messing about with something like this made of card and foamboard, so getting it made in plastic ought to be something of an improvement.
 
Geomagic DesignCAD drawing of assembly. Motor, sprocket, film channel and film strip combined.

So it's a stepper motor with a sprocket wheel attached and a film channel to guide the film through. Maybe not rocket science, but it's a mechanism and will need to be made with some precision if it's to work in any way at all. One day I'd like to 3D print this at home, but in the meantime, it's off to Shapeways.com with my .stl files again... 

CAD drawing of 25 tooth sprocket wheel to fit on motor shaft.
CAD drawing of film channel (guides the film by its edges) and housing for motor.

Monday, June 03, 2013

Serving Fine Web Pages For 17 Years








































Big thanks to old friend (and painter of visions) Nicholas StHelier. He's dug out an old postcard I made back in 1996. It's a calling card I used to give out to people to invite them to come and see my website.

Those were very different times...

The Tall Story Hotel was hosted on the free webspace I got with my dial up internet account from Pipex. Thus the snappy URL you see here. Looking up my record on whois.com it looks like I didn't register the chrisgavin.com and chrisgavin.co.uk domains until a few years later (May 5th 1999.)

Of course the link on the postcard is long dead now, but the page you are reading this on now is the descendant of that first site. The code, graphics and hosting service have been changed many times since of course. The current version of www.chrisgavin.com isn't really a proper website at all in the old sense; since August 2005, this has just become a sprawling collection of Blogger pages.

It was quite exotic to have your own website back in 1996. I must have been quite an early adopter. A year or two later I bought one of these too. Quite the dotcom boomer!

Back of the postcard, yep there it is ... 1996 !!!