Cold

This morning, after a healty 4 hours of sleep, our new roommate woke me up by making tea... which was nice, cause she offered me some along with a nice conversation.
Then, after about 10 minutes of peace and quiet, Hans Erik (our other roommate) appeard to be still awake, cause when i heard some noise outside and opened the door, i was immediately hit by a snowball...
After that, a short but intense indoor snowfight commenced (tru whith Floortje, another roommate still) slept peacefully.
We then dicided to have a 'swim' in the snow, so after undressing we dove into a beautiful pile of snow (currently there's about 40 cm of the stuff).


(click the picture for more madness)

After that, Hans Erik then went to sleep, and I went to the lab to do some soldering of my IR-LED's for the multitouch board.
Later, when Johan woke up, we agreed on taking a 'swim' again, but this time in the fjord...
Watertemperature -- about 3/4 degrees.
Outdoor temperature -- close to zero.

Ice climbing

Today was a day off, and Bas left early in the morning for a plane home, so now i am the only Dutch person here... But we also got up early and went ice climbing with a couple of people.
So we drove up to the small village that's near the lab, walked up the mountain a bit until we reached a frozen waterfall. We brought hooks, cables and clamp-on's (hooks you can strap to your shoes) and started climbing.
click one of the pictures for more...

Furthermore, Bas did a real good job setting up our website for the different projects. So i decided to keep this blog for writing more personal stuff (like i've been doing) and the site for technical issues.
Check it out: Stff
Neat, isn't it?

Snap fit fish

Yesterday we had a real great fish dinner, for which Haakon drove 6 hours to get 'the best fish'. And that it was... i have never tasted fish livers and eggs that were so soft and tasteful. Alongside we had some vegetables, potatoes and some real nice pinot gris. The fishes had to be cleaned before dinner, and they (tried) to learn me how to do that...
Here's me standing in a huge pile of fish...



We always have dinner together here, assembled around the main table in the lab.
not always as luxurious as this, but always really good.



The guy at the end of the table (with the glass) is Haakon, our host, and one of the nicest persons I've ever met.

On a more serious note, today I constructed my first snap fit object. Bas and I wanted to make something (more on that later) move around, so i made this little system that can be attached to a (stepper)motor.
Here's a picture of the thing:



The iron pen in the middle will be attached to the motor, and the object we want to move back and forth will be attached to the piece of plexi that sticks out.
I will post the technique to do this later on, but rest assured, I didn't come up with this myself. Johan (Great guy) here is the uncrowned 'king of snap fit'
Here he is, with a scale model of a doghouse they will be building for a local sled dog breeding guy.
It's all snap fit.

It is for sitting...

After 3 days of trying to make the beams for the house we are going to build, we got sort of fed up with it, and decided we were going to make a chair (for it was missing in the place were the shopbot is)...
So we found some wood, and started cutting:



Again, as always, we had a lot of trouble converting files and stuff... before we were able to get it into some kind of format the shopbot would eat.
We then set the jog speed (speed it uses to move without cutting) too high, so it skipped a couple of steps, and fucked up our pieces.
But, since we are persistent, we actually finished our first real chair.

So lo and behold!



After that we continued making some pcb's with the modela...
Interesting fact here: in Holland we have been using copper clad boards that are too hard for the mills... so it not only makes the mills blunt, it also cuts less good.
I'll shortly post more detailed info about what stuff to use.
I myself made a LCD controller board you can see here:



It can write 'hello' on a LCD screen.
Cool eh?

Shopbot

We have been using the shopbot to do some milling of the beams for a frame that Haakon (head of the house) wants to have inside of the lab...
We actually have used some stupid ways of milling, and after three days figured we could do the same in around 15 minutes as opposed to 3 hours... but that's why we are here of course...


On a different note, today was also for relaxing... so we slept till 3ish, had a slow start, and after dinner I sat in the sauna for about 40 minutes with Jasper, one of the Swedish guys who is planning to open a lab in
Malmo, Sweden.
He managed to convince me we should walk back trough the snow bare feet and with just a towel... stupid of me to agree really...

Stff

After a lot of mucking about with software, we are finally getting somewhere, using the shopbot and Deskproto (which actually is dutch milling software). Check out our site:
Stff

And finally we did see it...

Yeah! after a full day of talking, walking around with material, trying different styles of construction (got a nice cardboard modular construction kit now) we went outside to get to the shopbot... and there it was...
Pictures are taken by hand (no tripod, i'll get one tomorrow) so not so sharp... but hey! It's real polar light!!