News

As many of you who know me personally know, I try to stay on the forefront of technology. Rarely am I as impressed as I have been with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. I've had a coding project that I kept putting off since around Easter, and while I had most of the pieces figured out, I didn't have them put together. So tonight, since I just got some more consulting business on the AI side, I sat down with the new Sonnet model and gave it two of the project files. The first and larger one was the speech to text part, where I had identified the place where I could inject the Anthropic API calls for talking with Claude. The second was the conversation code I had written with the API calls. The thing is, I used a fake loop in that code, and it wouldn't actually be a real conversation if I used that code. So, what did I do? I just told Claude 3.5 Sonnet to merge them, keep most of the code the same, rewrite the fake loop to be a real one, and explain what it did. So it proceeded to do exactly what I wanted on the first try, in about 30 seconds. Oh, and it saved tokens by saying in the comments where to copy the boilerplate code from. Not to mention saving me mental stress. I still can't believe it worked on the first try. Now I was able to use Piper TTS to finish making a full speech-to-text-to-AI-to-speech program for the robot. This may actually warrant our first big Youtube video!

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Tonight's entry is about the power of doing small things over time. I've been building a robot platform for just over a year now(with a few multi-month breaks) and it's finally coming together into something that's a little more presentable than an impractical laptop that resembles a Christmas tree wrapped in lights(without the lights). However, I had a good demonstration of it(outdoors, no less) and despite a little spark to liven things up at the beginning, the actual tech demo of the individual recognition software worked great. I had it identify one of my mom's friends and tell her it was good to finally meet her, and gave her a compliment. As cool as that is, it's just one of the many capabilities that are present or will be. I'll write some more about this later. For now, let's celebrate the wins. I also got the e-stop working off just an accelerometer, which is awesome. That means if it hits something unexpected it will automatically cut power to the wheels. I designed it so that it's 'instinctual' to the robot. More on that later. It wasn't all victory, though. I'm having some difficulties with some other motors. It'll work out though; I've identified a possible solution and am ordering the parts to fix that, as well as a new build plate for the holographic effect. More on that later(ha). It's a good thing nobody reads these. But anyway, I've got to move on. This was tonight's little bit over time. I'm hopeful that I will get into a more regular cadence.

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Well, if you know me, you know that if I haven't posted on here, it's because things have been busy! I've been printing lots of color lithophanes, but one of the downsides of them is that they must print flat. This makes it hard to display them as there's no great way to hang them. While I work out a solution for that, I'm designing this lightbox which is the featured image of this blog post. I'm not done with the lid yet(trying to figure out whether to make it ornate or allow another picture, or have the option for both), but I'm about to print the test fit article.

I've also been making keychain tags, which if you came here because of those, welcome! We make a lot of bespoke things here, and the list of things available in the store is only going to grow. Having said that, I'm going to consolidate some of my things and work on getting Jason's Creations better integrated with the site. 

Thanks for listening, and stay tuned. I'm going to try and be better at posting, since I want to help build Crow's Contraptions into a community of makers, builders, creators, and dreamers. Feel free to comment about anything below, we should be pretty responsive!

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I know it's been a while. I know the site is a bit bare-bones at the moment; if you check back next week I think you'll find a lot of progress. I've been working on a commissioned 3d printed piece with VR tools[Gravity Sketch VR tonight but I'm probably going to switch to Kodon] because they're the most-capable things I have of recreating this with the skills(read: none) that I have with organic free-flow shapes like Blender can make. This is for a good friend of mine(actually for his wife but he's commissioning it) who is almost single-handedly the reason I graduated college(from an academic standpoint). It will be an orange glow-in-the-dark skull in this kind of style. While I think I may switch to a different program, I'm posting part of the modeling tonight since it's a draft and this blog post is also a draft just to remind y'all we do still exist. Having said that, I've also just now finished all the chores keeping me up so I'm just gonna leave this here and re-engage with the community later.

Peace!

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I'm writing this while I render the featured image for this post. I'm somehow completely unstressed about the launch now, we've been getting as much traffic as I expected(and then some), and I've gotten some great feedback from our alpha testers(despite the launch, I'm still not quite ready to call what we have here Production). The first ordered poster arrived Saturday and with it came more awareness of Jason's Creations, in that the postal worker is planning to get cutting boards for Christmas. It's definitely a good time to start planning ahead, since both custom woodwork and 3d printing take time to create. 

I also got a custom 3d design request for a spooky Halloween skull. I just ordered some glow-in-the-dark orange filament which will get here Monday. I'm planning to use Gravity VR to make the design, then see about printing the model. I may need to use special filament to have clean support removal; this would definitely be the project for that. More on this later, if I have permission from the client to disclose/sell other copies(I'm sure he won't mind, but consent is key). 

I designed a vase this morning; I figured it was an apropos thing to do since everyone does it eventually. It turned out decent and I was originally going to use it for this featured image, but when I was loving on my dog it fell and broke, go figure. I'll make another one that's thicker. I thought I had made it about 3 layers thick but it seemed like it only printed 2; easy enough to fix. 

Another thing I finished designing is our Production-ready model for Spraymore v1. I'm testing print viability tomorrow but it includes a hexagonal grip, branding, and QR code for the website now. It will be a 2-color print for the QR code. Possibly in the future for speed of processing we may use black epoxy as an inlay but for now I'm just doing it with the AMS on the new printer. Which is still broken.

Meh. The render for this turned out too small so I guess I have to keep writing some more. Let's see; I finished(sorta-not-really) putting Amara Blackwood's selections in the AI art gallery; while they are there, I did not create the product listings just yet, for which I owe her and JJ Alan an apology. That will go up soon, as well as a voting mechanism for you to also provide some human feedback into what goes into the gallery. 

I am avoiding adding critical functionality into the lithophanes section because I don't want to potentially add yet-another-montly-subscription, but I have to do it to make the lithophane sales reasonable. I still don't know why Shopify doesn't have this as a built-in feature, but here we are. I have no doubt I could make one, but life is short and you already see how backlogged I am on just this site alone. But progress is being made! 

I am maintaining my sanity, for those curious. I even took the time earlier to play Factorio and get some milestones out of the way(primarily building a cargo rocket silo--yes I'm playing K2+SE because 2,500 hours in vanilla wasn't enough). I took the dog to get a pup cup Saturday morning(bear in mind for me this is still Saturday as I had a very long nap in the early evening). I don't mention this on the site, but I've made a custom collar-holder with his name on it that goes on the wall. I can make all kinds of these sort of things; just set up a session with me about CAD. The preliminary meeting is free(as of 10/22/23, and probably is unlikely to change for a while). 

Oh hey the render finished and looks pretty reasonable. I guess we'll see how my first AMS multicolor print goes. 

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