Andrew R Gross

Last month, I joined a makerspace called HexLab.  It's been around five years or so, but the founder concluded that he no longer has the time to manage it, so he transferred ownership to Allen Pan, a YouTuber I follow.  At the same time, HexLab is moving to a new location. I've been volunteering weekly for the last four weeks, so I've gotten to see something old become new again and then take shape.  Last Saturday, HexLab had its first member meeting since I joined, and I volunteered as the interim facilities and safety coordinator.  For the next three months, I'll be responsible for setting up the equipment.  Equally exciting, though, is the opportunity to promote the ideal environment.  I think most tinkerers dream of getting to work in a place like Tony Stark's garage , or Shuri's lab , or  the batcave .  I want this to be a space with flavor, and as interim facilities coordinator, that's what I'm going to try to do.

My current project is a collaboration with Jack to build an underwater photo booth.  It lets users take four photos with the push of a button, then uploads them to a cloud drive so folks can post pics of themselves at the pool as soon as they dry their hands off. The back.  The red part will be 3D printed. There are numerous great online instruction manuals for building a photo booth using a Raspberry Pi, so that part was the first which we completed, and it went pretty quickly. The hardware consists of five key parts: A Raspberry Pi mini computer, which runs the camera. A Raspberry Pi camera module, which is similar to the kind of camera in most cell phone A display screen.  This is a small LCD screen that cost about $40. A display control board.  I don't fully understand that magic that makes this work, but it takes the images that the Raspberry Pi sends over an HDMI cable, and it translates them so the LCD screen can make images. A battery to pow...

If you've read this blog for a while -- a long  while -- you might know that I have been working on an underwater ROV on and off for more than a year.  This is another update. The good is that last year, I had a crude body for the Remotely Operated Vehicle.  It had propellers that were hooked up to a battery and spun.  It had a microcontroller that told them when to spin.  It had a Raspberry Pi single board computer to receive instructions over a USB tether and send them to the microcontroller.  And I had a program that would read data from a joystick over a long USB cord.  I finally thought that I just about had some kind of system I could put in water and drive around with a controller. Not so fast. The defining feature of an underwater ROV is that it goes underwater.  Which means that the electronics need to be inside of a waterproof enclosure.  And since radio waves don't travel underwater*, there needs to be a cable that ...

Tony, Jack, myself and a bunch of other friends dressed up to see Avengers: Infinity War at the Arclight Hollywood, and it was a blast. I started my costume six weeks ago, because I wanted to do something pretty ambitious.  I'd made a Captain America costume for Civil War in 2016, and based on the lessons I'd learned, I wanted to make this costume as a leather jacket that I could use as an actual day-to-day jacket.  I also decided that I didn't like the costume Cap wears in this new film, and so I'd ignore it completely and make something like what I thought his costume should've been. The outcome The final result was this jacket, a harness, and a belt.  It's made of some kind of artificial leather. The outfit is based off the uniform a disaffected Steve Rogers adopted when he renounced his identity as Captain America in 1988.  In the movie (left, below), Captain America is wearing the costume from his previous movie, but it's distressed and dark...

I made a replica of Mjolnir according to the classic descriptions (as opposed to the well known comic book version).  Unfortunately, Tony and I were both concerned that it might be too brittle for casual use during a party, so he used an alternative, but I was generally happy with the look and it has a great heft.  I'm definitely going to use plaster like this again in the future. Mjolnir, crafted in the classic Norse style

Here is a timelapse of the 3D printer I built for work:

Another small project.  I made a book display stand for my stepfather. Laser cut book display stand Reddit.com/r/diy link 

I made a new Instructable post.  It's a chess set I made for Jack for Hannukah. Instructable link: "Tabletop-to-vertical Convertible Chessboard" Tabletop / Vertical Convertible Chessboard

I finally posted an overview of the build process for the chicken coop.  I'm hoping that it gets selected as a 'featured' project, completing a hat-trick setup by the Captain America costume and the Arc Reactor. I started building that coop in March of 2015.  I finished it officially in October of 2015.  I meant to share an overview, since as my posts and this website attest, I'm trying to improve my skills in not just building things, but documenting how I did so and compiling all such projects into a kind of portfolio (which is this blog).  I'm very proud of the coop, but I was pretty daunted by the process of compiling it.  The challenge to get a third featured post on Instructables motivated me, though, and I'm really proud of the result. As proud as I am, it's humbling to see the entries people submit to Instructables contests.  People build and program drones from scratch, and present a summary of their approach with better communication skills th...

Recently, Julie and I discovered kombucha. We were at a vegan restaurant near our house.  Although their food is great and as a vegetarian I appreciate the service they provide, vegan restaurants tend to incorporate certain elements which feel very 'new-age'.  This is stuff Julie and I generally want no part of.  Imagined gluten allergies, for instance.  Or GMO alarmism. So it was on a lark that Julie purchased a bottle of kombucha.  It's fermented tea, which happens to be two of yuppies' favorite words.  To both of our surprise, it was great.  It's tangy and carbonated.  It tastes a fair bit like hard cider, although it has negligible alcohol.  It's like soda, but it's only got 30 calories.  Of course, that shit's going to be like $4 a bottle. So out of curiosity, I looked online to see how it is made and discovered that it is supposedly very, very, easy to make. You make tea.  You sweeten your tea with sugar. ...

I'm feeling really good.  I just posted the full set of instructions on how I made Julie's Arc reactor on Instructables.  If you haven't seen it, Instructables.com is a website where users can submit instructions on how to make something.  It's pretty remarkable.  You can find instructions for changing the bulbs in your headlights, recipes for brownies, or an guide to making friendship bracelets.  Among these are a lot of electronics projects. It's odd and inspiring to see how much can be made with such cheap, available parts so easily.  I recently looked to it because I had an idea at work, and found instructions on how to build an ohm meter from $30 of parts.  It's exciting to be able to access so much knowledge. At some point, I decided that it'd be cool to be able to provide that level of usefulness.  Fortunately, you don't have to produce a college course, you just need to do a good job documenting a project well done.  So I started ...

In preparation for Civil War, I pushed hard to finish the Arc Reactor prop I described in Part I .  Afterwards, I posted it to Reddit on the DIY forum .  It got a total of 3599 'upvotes' and 207 comments.  The next day, Jack told me that a coworker asked if his brother was Andrew, because she'd stumbled across the post, which had been reposted to another site entirely.  F' yeah. The finished product The inspiration Wearable Arc reactor prosthetic DIY

Failure is actually an overstatement.  But it's clear that the current approach won't meet my expectations, so I'm going to call it a failure and strive to do better. I've been designing an arc reactor that Julie can wear for cosplay or just when she wants to feel like a bad-ass . The initial design was based on a prop she ordered.  It was just LEDs and a battery holder.  I figured I could do the same thing, but miniaturize it and improve the construction. This is the original that served as inspiration for my design.  Notice the big bulky LEDs. The main improvement was to replace the big chunky LEDs with Surface Mount Device (SMD) LEDs.  See, LEDs are actually very, very, very small by nature.  When you see the kind that most hobbyists use, most of their bulk is actually to make them easier to hold and solder.  Miniaturizing them isn't really an issue.  You just manufacture them normally and then leave out the bulk.  The result ...