Goggles Goggles Goggles 1

Those are the beginning of my goggles. Looking back at them, I could probably have planned them out a bit better, but for what I had to work with I'm rather happy with how they're progressing. I even got out all the metal burrs out so that they don't poke little splinters into my face anymore! That being said, though, the steel is a bit uncomfortable to wear right up against my eye sockets, so I'm thinking some kind of padding is in order. I've been thinking maybe I ought to add some rolled flannel fabric around the rims, but then I'm not exactly certain how I'm going to get it to stick to the steel. Hot glue feels like cheating, but it may be my only option. The heat gun that I used to braze the steel ribbon to the steel pipe would set the fabric on fire, so unfortunately that's out.

There will be no nonfunctional gears on my goggles. Instead, I intend to add some iris mechanisms to both eyes (once I can bribe my way onto someone's CNC machine, anyone have some good cookie recipes they're willing to share?), green lenses, and at least 1 laser mounted on the side. I probably ought to also make a headband at some point.


How to make Really Heavy Glasses Frames:

1) Procure 1 3" steel pipe nipple, diameter to your specifications (I used 1.75"), with both ends threaded.

2) Sit down with calipers and devise needlessly complex formulas to make perfectly even angled cuts to get scalloped eye pieces.

3) Clamp the pipe to a firm surface.

4) Attempt to cut it with your Dremel, realize it will take about 7h to cut through it that way.

5) Get someone to teach you how to use the much more powerful angle grinder.

6) Attempt to use the angle grinder.

7) Observe that angle grinder has obliterated all planning of step 2.

8) Observe that angle grinder has kicked up a fine steel dust all over your face. Remove safety goggles and ponder your likeness to a raccoon for a couple minutes until you observe the twang that all the flying sparks left on the wall.

9) Continue angle grinding, creating several large burrs.

10) Finish cut.

11) Clamp down 1 of the eyepieces, burr side out. Change angle grinder head from cutting to grinding and apply to burrs. This may induce shrapnel. Eye protection is very important.

12) Get rid of all large burrs with angle grinder, then use Dremel to remove finer burrs.

13) Discover Dremel's polishing capabilities. This will set you back about an hour, but it won't get you much shinier.

14) Discover the 17 small burrs you missed. Go back over with a Dremel.

15) Cut slots for the 1/4" 14G steel ribbon. Thread precut lengths of steel ribbon through holes, manipulate with pliers into desired shape.

16) Rig up a vice on something fireproof.

17) Apply heatgun until goggles begin to glow, clamp down ribbon with long-handled pliers and apply some sort of binding flux*. You may have to do this sequentially, in which case it should be noted that the heatgun does not cool down rapidly.

18) Continue until all pieces are in place.

19) Be satisfied with progress for now.

20) Write self-deprecating blog post later about project.

*Yes, strangely enough this part where I was quite competent, but not with the angle grinder.

Fragments of Toaster's Mind Blather 3

1) I am currently wearing a pair of suspenders. The straps keep slipping down my shoulder and have been all night. While the suspenders are very good at holding my pants up, this is really really annoying. While it is entirely possible that I'm wearing these wrong or missing some kind of special trick, I cannot help but hypothesize that I will not be able to wear suspenders until I acquire an impressive pot belly to frame with them. I think this is a shame, and not just because there exist pictures somewhere of me dancing at a string party in just suspenders and jeans, because these are some damn snazzy suspenders.

2) It is probably bad manners to debone your dinner in front of vegetarians. However, I tried to be a vegetarian for 3 years so I do know empirically that not eating meet does not result in the development of an obstreperous sense of moral and social superiority.

3) I have taken this joke, stretched it everywhichway, smashed it, lit it afire, microwaved it, fumigated it, irradiated and blended it, grown moss upon it and then titrated it with exotic aromatic hydrocarbons and bacon, but still I find it hilarious.

4) The hackerspace is differentiating. Like how embryonic stem cells gradually specialize as they grow out in new spatial/cytokine niches, there has recently been a major explosion of stuff. New parts, tools, and supplies have been appearing daily. This is excellent as it allows us to expand beyond the range of just soldering electronics boards together. However, it contains 2 problems: A) I can't find anything anymore. I spent 40min looking for a bag of assorted resistors I'd left there and never found them, and when I found the bag of capacitors they were sitting right in front of my face on a workbench instead of in the various boxes I was hunting through. Recently someone else mislocated their fancy wire strippers and we rediscovered somebody else's big box of phototransistors and LEDs. And B) plastic chassis are bulky. We have salvaged several old Super Nintendos, tape decks, VCRs, etc and stripped them for parts and used them to teach people about electronics (including me), but the plastic cases they come in take up a lot of space and aren't nearly so useful as I'd have imagined. I am mostly convinced that the solution to this is to build a MakerBot 3D printer and grind them up to use as printy goop.

5) Speaking of 3D printers, there are several web-based businesses that will laser-cut or 3D print stuff one-at-a-time for you because the initial investment for either piece of equipment remains high. Ponoko is good for laser-cut materials and Shapeways is good for 3D printed stuff. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly I'm going to do with them, but once I do build something with them, I'll post pics.

6) I was empirically reminded tonight that it is a singularly bad strategy to play tetherball with your face.

7) I made for you a mix of music because I like blues and I like rock and roll and I especially like when they've been smashed together with a double bass.

8) There's going to be a real-life, real-time Scientists' Duel right soon where I am. I'm going up against a CMB grad student at a beer hall before a jury of my peers. Neither of us have seen the paper yet, and it's happening on Wednesday.

9) I am teaching a class in the hackerspace on quantum chemistry. I intend to discuss the VSEPR model of atomic structure through the magnety properties of the weak nuclear forces, talk about how it leads to the formation of covalent, hydrogen, and polar bonds and then tie the abstract of each of those into concrete biochemical examples. So far it looks like a dozen people may show up, which makes me somewhat nervous since my attempt to teach molecular biology a month ago quickly devolved into people asking very tangential questions that derailed the points I was trying to make. Apparently it was a bad idea to attempt to abstract the Central Dogma out past cellular anatomy. Retrospectively, I can see how that came across as nothing more than alphanumeric soup.

10) I started wearing contact lenses last summer and was amazed by the phenomenon of peripheral vision. I expected that, and it took about 3 months for me to stop habitually trying to adjust glasses that weren't there. I was not, however, expecting that the winter wind upon my eyes would induce intense watering from underneath my contacts. As it is rather inconvenient, I may have to invest in some clear goggles to keep the brunt of the wind off my eyes.

11) I have been trying, in vain, to digitally replicate the closely syncopated swing beat that appears in polka, Latin music, and blues. So far it doesn't seem that I can program it anywhere, although I have heard it done with MIDI inputs. In any event, I have realized that to make the music I hear in my head come out more effectively, I am going to need some sort of MIDI input into Reason instead of just using my keyboard and mouse pad. I would like to find some way to do this with Gak, as a squishy, oozy, sploppy interface (brightly colored, too!), but I won't be able to do this until I've gotten around to building myself an Atari Punk Circuit. In the meantime, I'm planning on routing a bunch of flex sensors through an ATMega and octocoupler to have a bendy interface. I may sew it into clothes to make a synth suit, depending on how durable I can engineer the copper foil in the flex sensors to be. However, I know myself and as such I know full well that I would be unable to resist pumping a fat fuzz bass through a synth suit most of the time.

Ideal Goggles

As a Mad Scientist, I have thought often and deeply about my Ideal Goggles.

I have even priced out and located parts for the various optics I intend to include. I intend to build 2X, 5X, and 10X on my dominant eye, iris mechanisms in both eyepieces, and a laser array on the weaker eye, possibly with selectable color LED mechanisms should I need to look at things in a different light. I find that an iris mechanism would be necessary for the optics to be useful, because the magnifying eyepieces in the goggles above, while sufficiently mad-looking, are impractical in such an array because they wouldn't cover much of one's field of vision and thus make focusing one's eyes on whatever was there very difficult.

However, the problem I continue to run up against is that of the headband and frame. I want a simple frame for the primary eyepieces, nothing too unnecessarily complex, but a sturdy enough headband that I can use it to anchor the optics and electronics. Brass or steel is an obvious good choice for the frame, but what about the headband?

What materials do you think would be best in building Mad Scientist Ideal Goggles?

Image source here, found through Gizmowatch found through Oobject.