Category: Design

Mechanical Keyboards Guide

A short list of the best mechanical keyboards.

Once you typed on a mechanical keyboard, you never want to go back to the stock rubber dome keyboards that come with most computers. And I am not even a gamer. I just spend a lot of time in front of computers. Even Logitech has entered the mechanical keyboard market aside from gaming with their MX Mechanical. It has become its own hobby, with enthusiast spending many hours on selecting, assembling, modifying keyboards. It is another rabbit hole. “How deep?” you ask? Just check out these YouTube Channels.

Instead of spending my own thousands of dollars, I decided I should rather eatable you to do it for me. So here we go, a list of my favourite keyboards. I have settled on the 75% form factor as the most suitable for me.

Matias Mini Tactile Pro

This Matias Mini keyboard is heavily inspired by the good old Mac keyboards and it is one of the fews that have Alps switches. Continue reading “Mechanical Keyboards Guide”

New HRI Podcast: Emotions and Consciousness in Robots

Extended Interview With Douglas Campbell

I am happy to announce a new episode of the Human-Robot Interaction Podcast:

Emotions And Consciousness In Robots

In the last HRI podcast episode we talked about the role of emotions for humans and robots. The interview with Douglas Campbell truly inspired me and there was not enough time in the last episode to go into the full depth of our conversation. So here it is, our full discussion about emotions and consciousness in robots.

Yellow-eyed penguin made with LEGO

Converting a 3D STL file to a LEGO model.

It has been some time since I designed this large scale model of a Yellow-Eyed Penguin for the Pop-Up Penguin exhibition. The model is 168cm tall and consist of approximately 60,000 LEGO bricks.

The organiser of the exhibition sent me the STL file of their fibre-glass penguin. I then used the brickplicator software to convert the 3D STL model into a LEGO 3D model that can be build. Since this was a very large model, Gerrit helped me a bit with the conversion. I then imported the model into Stud.io and rendered the model.

This does seem like a good workflow to convert existing 3D models of animals or any organic form, to LEGO models.

 

5th Edition of the Unofficial LEGO Color Guide

I am happy to announce that the fifth edition of the The Unofficial LEGO Color Guide is now available. The book is available as a paperback and hardcover from Amazon.com. An eBook (PDF) is available from Lulu.

An important update happened behind the scenes. In the past I exported the color database to Adobe InDesign and then create the catalog from there. This process was complicated, labour intensive and error prone. The database has now been changed to create the catalog pages directly. Unfortunately, not all the design tricks possible with InDesign can be replicated with the database. The visual design was therefore modernised and extended.

Bicycle Computer Mount For Bar End

This is a bicycle mount for a computer and a display unit of an ebike. It has 22mm and 32mm tubes to which computers can be mounted. The mount goes into the bar end of a steering wheel. This is paraticulary useful for recumbent bikes. The mount is designed for M5 nuts and bolts, but depending on the accuracy of your 3D printer you might need to use M4 bolts. You can download the 3D files over at GrabCAD.

Here is a technical drawing of the design:

Bicycle Computer Mount Bar Ends Drawing v2