Parallel Development

Staging Cylinder 2

tbishop — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:58:37 +0000

We spent last Friday evening staging Leo Villareal’s Cylinder 2 in our shop. Look for it at the TEFAF Maastricht art and antiques fair this month.

Job Opening

Will Pickering — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:16:53 +0000

Parallel Development is looking for a creative electrical engineer to join our team full time. We need somebody with a solid working knowledge of analog and digital design, embedded linux development, pcb design and some mechanical aptitude. Job requirements include:

1. Strong digital design skills including VHDL
2. Embedded systems development
3. PCB design in Altium Designer
4. Linux / C / C++
5. Creativity, interest in the arts and interactive design
6. Mechanical aptitude

Please submit resumes to info@paralleldevelopment.net.

NYT Mirror

Will Pickering — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:14:21 +0000

Glad to see that the mirror we designed and built for the New York Times R&D Lab is finally getting some attention. Check out what Brian House has got running on this thing. This was a tricky piece of integration – we totally gutted a 40″ samsung LCD, cleared it of some extraneous PCBS, and then built a low profile, high performance water cooled PC in the back. Despite having acres of room to work with every cubic inch seemed to get packed with something.

The red pearlescent frame contains a Kinect for facial recognition and gestural interaction, a microphone and an RFID reader. The LCD is covered by a sheet of Schott Mirona partially mirrored glass, which layers physical reflection and data on the screen.

Anina wiring up the maze of electronics.
Bench testing the piece.

infrared self portraits

Will Pickering — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 16:04:08 +0000

I had to run a diagnostic trip recently on an old project. We suspected that thermal problems may be contributing to a drop in LED brightness, so I decided to rent an infrared camera to quickly measure how hot things were running. Totally useful, although I probably should read the long section in the manual on the concepts and applications of infrared thermography before trusting the measurements too much. Aluminum reflects the infrared of me trying to measure the temperature of this panel:

brake booster

Will Pickering — Thu, 12 May 2011 13:23:42 +0000

Known only to trials bike aficionados is the elusive and oft misunderstood brake booster, a brace to reinforce a bike frame at the brake mounts. Relevant only if you use hydraulic rim brakes with squishy pads and ground rims to maximize the friction. My understanding of what happens when you pull the brake lever is as follows: brake pad comes into full contact with ground rim, subjecting the seat stays of the frame to huge torsional stresses. Seatstay twists, reducing the contact area of the pad to the rim. Pad slips, stays snap back, pad grips again, stays twist again and so forth. This all happens at the frequency of a deafening squawk that some riders cherish (like loud pipes on a motorcycle) but that usually means suboptimal braking. Throw a booster on the bike and the stays are less likely twist out and everything can be dialed in for maximum grippiness:

I have been unable to buy another of these for a second bike for two years now – every time I inquire, the booster has been on back order for months. Work and family schedule allowing, I’d like to machine a couple. What perfect little pieces of CNC porn these could be! Now I’m fantasizing about a little cottage side business here at Parallel, milling brake boosters in our downtime. Hmmm, extra income of $200 per year if I’m lucky? Perhaps the reason they’re so hard to come by is that the market is so small that it’s not worth the hassle…

volumill

Will Pickering — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:37:31 +0000

We’ve had Camworks for almost a decade, and it’s been good to have a CAM system tightly integrated with Solidworks. Until now, the toolpaths were OK but far from optimal. We just upgraded our seat to include the new Volumill module which makes high speed machining truly possible. Finally, CAM software that gets it right. You can tell just by looking at the curvaceous toolpaths on the screen that the machine’s going to run oh so smooth.

aluminum saw

Will Pickering — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 15:27:48 +0000

After years of cutting aluminum with table saws and chop boxes, we finally broke down and bought a 20″ aluminum upcut saw from PMI that arrived the other day. I am not going miss the sound of aluminum chips bouncing off my safety glasses nor the hot sting on my skin. Most importantly, through, is the promise of the burr-free, mirror finish cut through an aluminum 4 x 10. No more of that godawful prismatic texture left on the cuts, no fiddling around with deburring the fins on custom heatsinks… Billet, anyone?

spherical jig

Will Pickering — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:46:32 +0000

Drill jig for Leo Villareal’s death star of spun aluminum, LEDs and car paint.