9 ms·
LED Industrial Piercing
- wwqrd 3y agoThis guy is really churning out awesome projects right now (or at least the videos for them). I got his satellite clock kit for the office and love it!
- adzm 3y agoI was surprised that these did not already exist. Great work and great write-up!
- qvrjuec 3y agoSuch a big fan of this guy. Found him through his UV protection amulet project: https://mitxela.com/projects/amulet https://mitxela.com/projects/amulet
- sweettea 3y agoVery cool! Have definitely thought about this for mine, have never actually gotten past looking around and seeing nobody makes them yet. It'd be amazing to throw some bluetooth on there and be able to flash different patterns, or to throw a fullblown mini screen on it... I wonder how hard it would be to make a set of large-gauge lobe jewelry with a screen in it. Perhaps 1/2" or 3/4" would be doable? A thought re sales and sizing, though: industrials are usually sold in quarter-inch increments and most people buy 1-2.5" from what I understand, so it should be doable to make them to sell.
- sen 3y agoA 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.
- cdchn 3y agoYou just gotta gauge your lobes out enough to fit a smartwatch.
- bbqbbqbbq 3y agoI don't understand how people learn to do this sort of machining, PCB design, etc from nothing, with no machines or tools or anything. Any pointers?
- etrautmann 3y agoLots 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.
- dosman33 3y agoUsually 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.
- jvanderbot 3y agoI feel seen. I'm lucky to have all the resources in the world except time and naivete
- i_am_jl 3y ago
- stkai 3y agoBeautiful. You're so humble, but this is really creative and inspiring.
- bbqbbqbbq 3y ago[dead]
- igor47 3y agoSad that he lost access to his marker space, and the equipment he used to make this project. I feel like hacker spaces, especially with industrial and metal working equipment, are on the decline. Am I over fitting on the tragedy of TechShop in the SF Bay area, or are folks observing this in other places too?
- Takennickname 3y agoSeems like everything in the bay area is shutting down, no?
- coldbrewed 3y agoIt'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.
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y agoIt'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.
- fragmede 3y agoDouble Union is a women-only makerspace in the Mission in San Francisco because there's something about makerspaces that they seem to trend in that direction, so a women-only makerspace is necessary. https://doubleunion.org/ https://doubleunion.org/
- astrea 3y agoVery cyber punk. Can’t wait for the age of cybernetics
- samstave 3y agoJohnny Mnemonic: These can smuggle data, surveillance, etc. It will be an interesting world when Sneaker Nets are the safest smuggle.
- joelvalleroy 3y agoThe model that the user can interact with to rotate and pan on this website performed amazingly.
- kragen 3y agoyeah, 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 https://mitxela.com/other/3d/loader.js?2 view-source:https://mitxela.com/img/uploads/metal/scaffold/scaffold-case.wrl 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 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
- marginalia_nu 3y agoIronically 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...
- michaelteter 3y agoWhy not hang the battery on a chain as part of the design? I’ve often wondered why smart watches don’t have battery link bands… seems you could add a ton of capacity in a fashionable way.
- michaelt 3y agoSome 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.
- junon 3y agoBatteries are heavy, it'd whip around your ear. As someone who used to have an industrial, I can't imagine it'd be comfortable.
- junon 3y agoA 3mA draw seems high even for this circuit. Maybe putting the LEDs on a constant duty cycle PWM would reduce current consumption, oftentimes attainable without any reduction in perceived brightness. I wonder if it's possible to also have a series resistor between the battery and microcontroller to bring it down to its lower end of acceptable voltage range for longer. Just a thought.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago3 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.
- andrewaylett 3y agoI read the title as LED Industrial Pricing, and was initially confused but definitely not disappointed.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoI can't see in the article any mention of the metal type used where there is skin contact. Metal for piercings can't be any old thing as people can develop allergies to the metal, usually from the nickel leaching out. Apparently that can get pretty nasty. The usual stainless steel formulation is something called 316L, I hope the guy used that, or something similarly suitable.
- anymouse123456 3y agoGreat video, awesome execution and I'm really grateful for how much mitzela shares. That said, I'm always sad to get shot in the eyeball by bare LEDs. After giving this idea a little thought, I'd love to see an iteration that diffuses the LED light through the skin... Wow - subtly glowing ears, noses, lips, etc?!
- angiosperm 3y agoThere is enough room in the end cap for an electronic compass that clicks when you turn your head past a cardinal point. With a strong enough magnet, instead, just its torque might be enough to train yourself to.
- gaybel 3y ago[flagged]
- gaybel 3y ago[flagged]