Dave Durant, Tony Buser – You’re welcome.
Tag Archives: Doctor Who
Doctor Who Christmas Special 2010 Trailer
Since the revival1 of Doctor Who they’ve had a Christmas Special each year, but it airs at least a day later here in the States. Last year I totally missed the Christmas Special and had to wait several more months before BBC America re-aired it. This year BBC and BBC America will be airing the Christmas Special on December 25! Huzzah!
In case you enjoy this show too, above is the trailer for the upcoming special. :)
- Regeneration? [↩]
More Doctor Who nonsense
Everything about this photo makes me happy
((Photo courtesy of gbrummett.))
Worse than his usual rubbish
This last season of Doctor Who has been really great. You have probably gleaned from this blog that I’m a big fan of the show.1
I just re-watched one of my favorite episodes from this season (there were many great episodes this season) – the one with Vincent Van Gogh.
A great bittersweet episode for a melancholy day. :)
- Bonus points if you can name the episode from which I borrowed the title of this post [↩]
Glowing Logo Cube by Domonoky
Domonoky uploaded his “Glowing Logo Cube.” I’m loving this thing. The second I saw it, I thought of The Pandorica from the season finale of this last season of Doctor Who. Here’s a papercraft version of the Pandorica from AFT Downloads, a website devoted to Doctor Who papercraft:
Papercraft Pandorica
That image below is from Peter McKinstry’s online gallery of amazing work he’s done for Doctor Who and other super cool things.
.jpg "The Pandorica")
The Pandorica
All I would need to do in order to create a printable Pandorica would be to make a 3D printable version of the Pandorica faces, slot them into the glowing logo cube frame, and drop it into the base.
I swear this is not a zombie themed Doctor Who fansite
So, just ignore these links to awesome:
- 13 awesome episodes of the new series of Doctor Who
- Mostly candid photos of Matt Smith and Karen Gillan
It’s really that I enjoyed these links and find this a more interesting place to bookmark them. :)
Blueprints for building a Dalek
You must already know by now that I am a fan of Doctor Who. I really wanted to build one as a kid – and had even heard the BBC had long ago published and gave away designs on how to make your own. Then, about a week ago I saw this blog post showing a form letter kid received from the BBC in the mid-eighties after inquiring about the plans. The letter from the Doctor Who Production Office politely and patiently explains the plans, originally released in 1973, included cost projections that were out of date. There’s a short disclaimer saying the kid should not use it for commercial purposes, etc. And, they close with an apologetic not saying they are unable to assist with finding suppliers.
Yesterday morning another blog post went up linking to the actual plans themselves! There’s also a link to Project Dalek – a fan site for people who share information about the Daleks they are building.
Edit: Each page of the plans are scanned and online as separate GIFs, one set as black and white and the other set as grayscale. I’ve zipped the scans and turned each set into a separate PDF. I’ll upload them shortly.
Note to self
Time Lord Seal
In continuing with my Doctor Who fanboy prints, I’d like to create a Time Lord Seal coin. Coins are cool. The BBC put up the design file associated with the Time Lord Seal from The End of Time.
Real life sonic screwdriver
This morning I received an e-mail from Bre out of the blue introducing me to Travis Goodspeed. Apparently Travis has been working on building sonic screwdriver guts out of the GoodFET, a universal JTAG programmer, a “sonic screwdriver of hacking.” Travis suggested a GoodFET could be programmed to act as a TV-B-Gone, light show, or any number of other things. Given that his circuit board is about 3″ x 0.85″ x 0.2″1 , there shouldn’t be a problem finding space for it in the sonic screwdriver I’m in the middle of designing. 2
Freaking sweet.
So, here’s my real life sonic screwdriver wishlist:
- Lights. Red LED3 , white LED4 , green LED5 , and a UV LED6
- An actual screwdriver bit or spot where you can attach a screwdriver bit. It would just be cool to have a sonic screwdriver that could be used as a screwdriver.
- A shakey Tic-Tac container style recharger. Having a sonic screwdriver that doesn’t need batteries would be awesome.
- A tiny speaker that played the sonic screwdriver sound.
- A tiny magnet. I remember watching Doctor Who back in the day, black and white old school episodes, where he used his sonic screwdriver to take screws out of things, bolts out of doors, etc in the worst stop motion animation the BBC could get away with. Still, if this sonic screwdriver had a magnet, it could actually affect a physical change via magnetic force.
- TV-B-Gone. On the episode “Midnight” Doctor Who shuts off a bunch of TV’s using his sonic screwdriver. This would be an INCREDIBLE feature!
- Flash drive and/or mini-memory card reader. Perhaps with the entire library from PortableApps.com installed.
- For those of you non-imperialists out there: 76.2mm x 21.59mm x 5.08mm [↩]
- TBuser, if you want to help, lemme know! [↩]
- For night vision. Also, there are suggestions that a sonic screwdriver can have a “red setting.” [↩]
- As a flashlight. [↩]
- The 11th Doctor’s screwdriver has a green light. [↩]
- For making things fluoresce such as secret messages, blood stains, and monsters. [↩]
Design-print fail
I’ve been slowly working on the design of a printable (and fully MakerBottable) sonic screwdriver. This model of the sonic screwdriver is built up of a number of concentric cylinders, has several significant overhangs well in excess of 45 degrees, and is larger than the MakerBot’s built capacity. In order to deal with these design problems, I modeled it in sections.
In order to make the overall result something I could just pop/snap/slide together I designed it making some sections which were split vertically and other sections which slide around those sections to keep them together. In order to make the parts quickly printable I designed all the parts at around 0.5mm thickness.
About 40% of the way through the print one of the vertical sections wasn’t coming out properly – probably because it was too thin. The parts were too thin and flexible and ended up tearing between layers and just being too flimsy.
I also noticed something odd – the extrusion was too thin on that side of the model. I can’t be sure why this is happening – but I suspect it’s due to the extruder not getting a good enough grip. Perhaps I need to floss the extruder pulley or install a new extruder idler wheel. However, it doesn’t explain why the extrusion was too thin on just that one side and no other spots.
Suggestions?