It's finally here, the 2011 Hex Desktop Calendar. And just like last year, it's up late!

This is a derivative of my 2010 Calendar, which in turn is a derivative of the Hex Connector Toy by 4volt.

Enjoy!

(Full disclosure, the photo is of the 2010 calendar. I still need to cut one.)

or gearLinks ...I can't decide which name I prefer.

Anyway, the story:

Talking to my mom she told me about how my dad couldn't keep his hands off the gEarings I made her for mother's day, and how everytime they went out, he wanted her to wear them so he could show them off to people.

So for Christmas (yes, I'm way behind on uploading this thing) I modified the design to make them a pair of cufflink gears. This involved making everything larger, widening the track for the posts, and closing the hole in the center that was used to store the earrings backings.

This design was inspired both by 4volt's Hex toy and this Bonsai Calendar [ notcot.org/post/26450 ]

I really liked the idea of a calendar desk toy, and thought there was something really nice about the idea of building with time, so this construction toy calendar came about.

What I really like is that at the end of 2010, there's no need to throw out this calendar. Instead, a new calendar for 2011 (and so forth) can be cut, and used with the previous year's to build bigger and better creations.

I had a little extra space on some 1/8th inch plywood I cutting for another project, and decided to cut a copy of Travis77's puzzle [ thingiverse.com/thing:1008 ]

Scaled down for 1/8th inch material thickness, it was just too thin, so I decided to double it up, and added some #4 screw holes to hold it together while I glued the material.

After using the pulley rig I designed here: thingiverse.com/thing:566 for a few weeks I realized that the rubber band was clinging & slipping quite a bit. I tried a few different things as a pulley belt, but nothing worked to my satisfaction. So I redesigned it to use a set of gears instead, which totally eliminated the slippage and greatly improved the accuracy.

One thing to remember though is that while pulleys move wheels in the same direction, with gears the dimmer will turn in the opposite direction of the servo, so be sure to adjust any code you may have written accordingly.

For Mothers day I made my mom a set of earings that double as a working planetary gear.

...sorry for the pun in the name.

I got sick of not being able to find readily available vector files of gears, so I made 98 of them. (From 3 to 100 teeth) Enjoy!

I designed this as a component for a piece that I'm not ready to reveal the whole story of yet.

This portion of the project contains an outlet, a dimmer switch, and a servo (and for now: a dirty rubber band). The servo operates the dimmer, which in turn controls the amount of current going through one of the outlet's two sockets. (The other one delivers consistent power to the micro-controller / servo via a wall wart.) This is a really nice way to control an outlet...because in all truth, full source voltage is scary, scary stuff.