(all this and more is available at http://mentalblock.net)

Mental Block system schematic

(Eric Mika has a ton of great documentation for this project on his blog, Frontier Nerds)

Eric came up with a great idea for how to make a variable detent potentiometer using a regular pot and a vibrating motor. When the pot is adjusted to a specific interval, the motor vibrates for a moment letting you know you’ve reached the first, second, third, etc, interval.

Here’s Sofy’s Pure Data patch that mirrors binaural beats– it was really too bad we couldn’t get the radios to work.

Here’s what we came up with, in action:

A fun video of that stuff getting cut out on the laser:

All my life I’ve been a fairly “disorganized” person, meaning, I have my own system of organization, which is to say that I leave things laying around, cluttering my desk, stuffed into drawers, on the floor or any flat surface. But, I almost always know where things are. When I was a kid in public school I had a tiny desk that got filled by returned homework, doodles, writing supplies, etc, within the first few weeks. At the end of the school term we had to empty our desks out– wonders and terrors emerged from what my mom dubbed, The Bermuda Triangle. That particular system no (more…)

A couple weeks ago I started working at the Advanced Media Studio, a division of ITS. I’m one of the people who executes jobs using the laser cutter. Soon I’ll learn the rapid prototyping machine (3D printer), and the large format printers and drum scanner.

For my first project on the laser I decided to make a zoetrope. To start, I made a file in Adobe Illustrator that tells the laser where to cut and how to cut. The red lines are (more…)