My wife is so wonderfu!

It’s my birthday today, and my awesome wife Diana bought me some awesome presents.

First off was the Cigweld Weldskill 170. That’s the one I knew about. It was already awesome!

What I wasn’t expecting is the iPod
Touch I was presented with when I woke up this morning! OMFGZ I wasn’t expecting that!

So here I am, writing a blog post on the touch, just to test it out!

Yeah!

I love you sweetie! You blow my mind every birthday!
Xoxox

Cricut Cutter With USB, it can be done!

The Cricut is a cool little cutting machine, aimed at the Craft/Scrapbooking market. It looks like a printer, but is more like a pen plotter. If you saw my previous post, I bought one for my loving wife Diana for her birthday.

The Cricut comes with very minimal usability out of the box, and requires you to buy ridiculously expensive cartridges. You can get cartridges on amazon from about $25 (pretty cheap) but most are much more than that. With postage on top of that (to Australia, makes it expensive). Locally, You’re looking at more like $60 per cartridge for a cheap one. There must be a better way!

On the back of the machine, there is a USB port. Sweet. surely there is some software out there that can make good use of the cutter, and make it much cheaper to use?

Well, there is, BUT……….

There is the Cricut Design Studio, which seems like a handy idea, and likely is in many ways, if you have a bunch of cartridges.

You see, the Cricut Design Studio requires you to have bought the cartridges that you want to use. You can’t print custom-made designs, or use fonts on your computer or anything, so you are really only marginally better off with this software. It does allow you to lay things out better than the basic interface you get just the machine.

Then, there was several of other pieces of software available such as Sure Cuts a Lot, and Make the Cut, which allowed you to use standard True Type fonts on your computer, as well as importing vector graphics from other software  to cut your own design of graphics.

Of course, the makers of the Cricut cutters didn’t like this, as for the price of a single cartridge, you could then use all the fonts and pictures out there on the internet, without ever having to pay the makers of the Cricut anything. It appears that they started sueing all the makers of this software, so now none of them work with the Cricuts any Longer.

But, you are not out of luck just yet, I have worked out (with help from the internet)  how to make the Make the Cut program work once again with the Cricut!
You see, Make the Cut uses plugins to interface to the Cricut, and other different Cutting hardware. It seems all the makers have done to make the software incompatible is remove the Cricut driver dll from the application.

Some very awesome people out there have discovered that, by putting the dll file in the plugin folder for the current Make the Cut download, you can still use the software.

Make it Happen

First,I should note, that I was lucky enough that the firmware on the Cricut was already up to date, so i didn’t need to upgrade ours. You may need to upgrade firmware, you apparently can do this with the demo of the Cricut Design Studio. A quick google should get you going in the right direction. I think Make The Cut! works with firmwares of 1.1 and above for the Cricut Personal. Your cricut will tell you the firmware version on the LCD screen when you turn it on.

First, with a standard printer style USB cable, plug the cricut into your computer. Windows will hopefully find and install the drivers for the cricut automatically. The cricut will appear as a usb to serial adaptor. When I first tried with my laptop, I had struggles, but eventually it seemingly sorted itself out somehow. My wife’s worked right away, and both laptops are windows 7. If it doesn’t install properly, I’m afraid you’ll have to do a bit of research online.You may need to download the drivers manually.

Download and install Make The Cut! (the demo will work, so you can test it all before you commit to the software).

Google “PCCPlugin.dll” and download the file to your computer. This is the driver for the cricut cutters. It should be out there for you to find. (edit update: try these links which have been provided in the comments: filedropper, filedropper(zipped), filefactory (zipped). these are not my files, so they may go down at some point)

Place the PCCPlugin.dll file in the plugin directory of Make The Cut (default will likely be c:\program files\Make the Cut!\Plugins).

Run the program. Now when you click on Cut Project With… you should be able to choose the ProvoCraft Cricut.

If this works for you and you haven’t already bought Make The Cut, I recommend buying it now. We chose to wait until we’d seen it working before buying it. In demo mode Make The Cut will work but anything cut will be cut with a big X thru it, making it pretty useless.

Now Enjoy using the hardware you own, in a way YOU like it.

Happy Birthday Diana!

Today I would like to take the oportunity to wish my lovely wife a Happy Birthday for yesterday!

I love you my Sweet! I hope you had a wonderful day!

Diana trying out her new Cricut

Above you can see her playing with her present, a Cricut cutter, working with Make The Cut!.

Unfortunately Make The Cut are no longer allowed to make their software work with the Cricut cutters, but with a bit of research, I managed to work around that to get the two talking again, and thus, making the Cricut a truly wonderful machine!

I’ll post more info on on what I had to do to make it work soon, but this post is to thank my wife for being so damn awesome! and to let her know how much I love her.

I love you sweetie. XOXOXOXOX

Quick Electronics Prototyping / playing

Here on my blog, I had an idea of individual  electronic modules which can connect to a microcontroller (in my case, the picaxe microcontroller) . My little series never went too far, with switches, LEDs, A speaker, potentiometers, Temperature probes, and the picaxe 08m and the picaxe 18

Now SeeedStudio have used a similar idea in their Electronice Brick kits and  you can buy the ready made kit from Little Bird Electronics for AU$60, or straigh from the SeedStudio Store. If you go to the seedstudio store, they have many addon components for the kit

Above is what you get in the starter kit. It makes a neat way go get started, but i’m sure it won’t take long for you to want to expand your collection

And just to make things doubly clear,  I have no involvement in this product at all, they just had the same idea and ran with it, ending up with a great looking product. Check it out, its a great idea for beginners

In-phone video production on a Nokia 5800

A couple of months ago now, I finally ditched prepaid phones again, and got myself a plan, and along with the plan came a new phone.

The phone is Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

I discovered that with the phone, it is possible to film, perform basic editing, add titles, and background music, and then upload it to YouTube, all from the phone itself

The above video, staring my lovely fiancée Diana, was created from start to finish in camera

Camcorder Microphone Adapter

This is my latest project. It is a converter box that converts the 3.5mm stereo microphone input on my camcorder, into some common interfaces, Such as XLR, RCA, and dual 3.5 mono plugs.

Specifically, the driving idea was driven by the XLR inputs, and I was contemplating making a simple cable with 2 XLRs, but I decided to go with the jiffy box and extra inputs for flexiblilty

The TGIMBOEJ

So, I’ve recieved the  tgimboeja little while ago, and I’ve been slowly getting around to going thru it properly, and documenting everything, and adding my bits and pieces.

OK to start off with, here is the box as it came, just opened up:

and then removing some of the bubble wrap to take a peak:

Blog back on topic!!

OK, so for the best part of this year, my blog has been completely off topic. Hijacked for my Network Media Production course at university, I’ve chosen to keep the posts uni related for the period. I have since worked out how to make other blogs under the same account, which i contemplated switching my NMP stuff to, but due to a couple of reasons, mostly due to me being lazy, I never did the swap

but now the course is over, I can get back onto what I created the blog for, and that’s for posting vaguely interesting things I make and do at home.

You should see a few other blog posts appear that I’ve slowly been working on for the last little while. I probably could have come up with more, but what i’ve got will have to keep you entertained.

Windows Live Writer

I’ve also discovered a cool tool from Microsoft – Windows Live Writer. Its a blogging application, basically a wordprocessor, with blog intergration. It allows for me to write blogs in a desktop application, and post straight to the blog. Its a shame I didn’t come across this before, while Networked Media Production was still going. Nevermind though, one class finishs, but the world keeps on going.

What does that mean for the blog? not a lot really I guess. It makes posting blogs easier, integrating image uploading too, as well as even youtube integration. I’m hoping the easier it is to blog, the more motivated I will be to blog things, and hopefully, more updates for you, the readers

Enjoy.

Matt

Assignment Two Rationale

In the beginning, I had to decide which part of the assignment to do. Initially, it was between the data visualization, and the video critique. After a short amount of time, I had pretty much decided to do the data visualisation. The only thing left to do was decide on the data set, and get to work.

I threw around a few ideas for the data, including my bank transaction history, as well as sourcing data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Eventually, I decided to go with the ABS statistics from the last census. Specifically dealing with Canberra and the population of each suburb.

The next step is HOW do I do this visualization? There are endless ways to deal with it, ranging from a really basic MSPaint effort, Photoshop, or using something like Excel or Google Charts. Then I remembered hearing about Processing in class. I had heard of it before as a matter of fact, but had never done anything with it, so I thought it would be interesting to give it a try.

After a while of playing around, I managed to come up with this. You will need Java enabled to view it. If you click on the screen, it will draw a red dot. It was a quick mock up of what I was thinking of doing for the assignment, but in the end, the assignment took a slightly different route.

A screen shot of my initial mockup of my idea

In order to put the assignment online, I was going to have to host it somewhere, so off to Google to find free web server to host it.After a bit of comparing, I came across host-ed. There are so many different ones out there, but host-ed looked ok, so I signed up.

I found it a rather interesting process working out the free hosting site I used to host the files. I’m sure there are easier ones out there, but after a few minutes, I had it worked out, and had the mock-up online to test if it was going to work online. It worked fine, so it was pretty much decided, Processing was going to be my Visualization engine.

Fairly quickly, the project evolved from the map based visualization in the mock-up above, to a layout similar to the New York Times Olympic Medals Count.

New York Times visualization of the Olympic medals count

The Ranking view is most similar to my project really. I was going to implement something similar to the year slider, but I could not find the information for other years on the Australian Bureau of Statistics site.

I have already mentioned the Australian Bureau of Statistics in this blog. The ABS was my source of data for the assignment. I chose the ABS due to the open nature of the data, requiring citing the ABS as the source, as laid out by this page.

Programming in Processing was fairly straight forward. Having some experience with java made things a easier, as Processing is really an extension of java, which takes care of a lot of things for you.

This doesn’t mean the programming was easy however. There were a few sticky moments for me, one being sorting the list of suburbs. I managed to get the sort by population to work first, using a Bubble Sort algorithm. I understand a Bubble Sort is not very efficient, but when dealing with a small number items, as I was, it was more then sufficient.

When it came to sorting by Alphabet, I ran into the issue of not being able to use less then (<) to do the comparison on a string. Instead I had to do a little more research, and came across a handy way java has of sorting objects, by creating a class that tells Java’s Array.sort() how to deal with your own objects. This made sorting the array of objects even easier. I contemplated changing my sort by population to use Java’s Array.sort(), but chose to leave it, as I could use the time to work on other areas of the project.

In conclusion, I enjoyed the experience of using Processing in making visualizations, and look forward investigating more of its possibilities. The art of data visualization is a large one, and while this assignment has taught me a lot, there is still much to learn out there, and I look forward to learning it.

You can find the link to my assignment HERE

a screenshot of my assignment

Simple Meccano Robot Arm: redone

The arm in its current state.

My original Meccano type arm has been one of the more popular posts on my blog, view wise, However, it was never really a finished project. It being christmas and everything, i’ve got  some spare time due to holidays, so i’ve re-visited the robot arm.