Home Automation Adventure: Living With Google Home Mini

Photo credit Wikipedia

I didn't expect to have one of these and had voiced my opinion against bringing such things into the house in answer to my son's persistent begging for a while. My main objections (uneducated) were that I figured it would be less of a practically useful device and more of a pain to figure out and use, and that I didn't know how Google would end up using any information it picked up from being in our house.

Laser Cut Boxes and Light Up Plushies: Pulling Out All the Stops In the Maker Space

I just did a hard and fun project with two English teachers as part of their 11/12 grade students reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. They made stuffed monster plushie dolls with hand sewn LED circuits and designed wood and acrylic boxes to "contain" them (containing the monster being one of the themes in Frankenstein).

Processing's Turtle Library to Cricut Vinyl

Here's a workflow I'm trying out for Leah Beuchley's Turtle library for Processing, making vinyl cutouts with a Cricut Maker machine. These steps will produces shapes that will allow the cricut to follow the outline to retain the full design in one piece. Also uses Processing's pdf library. This example is a very simple shape but it will be interesting to push the Cricut and see how detailed it can get.