News– Page 2 – Crow's Contraptions

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!

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.

I wanted to make a bigger splash but I'm still working on some integrations. I'll keep this short, but the site has been live since noon-ish today! I'll keep working over the weekend to finalize some of the pages, some aren't live yet but will be tomorrow, and overall I am excited about what's to come. We hope you continue with us through this journey called life. Until next time, may you be well.

Well, tomorrow is the big day. Maybe "big" is an overstatement. There will be a lot of changes over the coming weeks. I didn't give myself enough time for launch(in my defense, I have a day job and I thought some functionality would be built into our e-commerce platform instead of getting nickel-and-dimed), and it will be a chaotic mess. Good thing starting the actual company happened May '22 so I don't have that organizational figuring-out to do as well. I'm taking off a half-day tomorrow to properly manage the launch, so that means updating pictures, trying to add functionality, and more.

In other news, I was going to have a really cool print to share with this blog post. It failed after 22 hours of printing and getting 92% done. That's 3d printing for you. Even with a quality machine, there will still be failures. The joy of this one is that it detected there was a problem and kept it from getting worse.

I do hope that we get some interest in the CAD/3d printing side of things. I tried for years to get into 3d modeling when I first got into computers. Rhino3d was amazing but too complicated for my younger self, although I did manage to make some image compositions with X-wings flying above a local lake. Fun times. Fusion 360, though, was the first program I ever found that let me take what's in my head and put it solidly into a computer. I started using Fusion on 12/20 in 2015, and since then I've put hundreds of hours into creating things. In August 2019, I went half-in on a Prusa i3 MK3S to start my 3d printing adventure. It has opened many doors and brought insights to me that I would not have just by working in software. Today is not that day nor is this post an example of what is to come, but I hope to write more detailed posts in the near future once we are officially launched.

Until then (about 14 hours from now), I just have to keep all my plans on something resembling a track. And hey, it's not like anything's gonna happen on launch day, right? That'd be pretty crazy and very statistically unlikely. Please forgive the current (as of 10/19/22) mess and check back often. I want to build community here.

P.S. This print[see featured image] failed in at least 2 ways, but I'm putting it up here to remind myself that any process can fail, it's how you recover from your failure that matters. I could have put another image of a CAD success I had; the only thing holding me back from my first b2b sale is that he hasn't tested it yet. That would be neat, as it's a well-engineered part. However, while I can sell both that and the subject of this post's featured image, I imagine more people will want the latter.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...

MEDITATION XVII Devotions upon Emergent Occasions John Donne

I am going to take a more relaxed and ambling path with regards to this entry. First, I'd like to properly introduce the company. I'm Michael Crow, and I've always harbored an interest in technology and computing for as long as I can remember. I was persuaded to start this company after my co-founder Jason convinced me to design Spraymore. Part of the reason we took so long to do a launch was going through the patent process; while ultimately we decided Spraymore didn't contain sufficient novelty on its own to be patentable, at least it seems like almost all of the patents that remotely resemble it expired before I was born, and the ones that weren't expired before 2015, meaning I think we should be fine to sell this. The concept has just been lost to time. Speaking of which, I have a next-gen Spraymore that I'm actively designing, but the CAD design has been (unnecessarily) challenging. Once I finish and test it, we'll again work through the patent process for it to see if the changes are sufficiently novel.

I do have a day job which I will not further detail other than to specify that any contract work will not involve sysadmin or infosec-related work. I'm trying specifically to focus on CAD design, 3d printing, epoxy and AI research here. Which, admittedly, is already a big stretch for a small company. Good thing this isn't our primary income, for now. Maybe you can help be a part of our growth! Right now, we're trying to find space to fully expand our epoxy side, which is one reason we don't have as many examples of that as we'd like. But any merch sales do help us. I think. Our first poster shipped today and the sale is showing a net positive, so whatever math I did last year seems to be working still.

I mentioned epoxy twice before, so now I need to introduce Jason, the hardware side of the show. He's a man of many talents, and has wanted to do epoxy tables for a while, so since we were already establishing ourselves as a plastics manufacturing company(through 3d printing Spraymores), it was easy to add that as a core competency. We currently are looking for more working space(some companies start out of garages--they're lucky). Expect to see a lot more from Jason's Creations in the near future!

Finally, there's Corvie[pronouns: ze/zir] and zir creator, JJ Alan over at Generative AI Networks. He has spent hours tuning Corvie's functionality and allowing access to a near-cutting edge GPT3.5 implementation, which you can access by talking to Corvie. The interactions do get logged into a CSV where we can take your orders for further review.

Oh wait, I'm not done yet. There's so much more. The curated AI gallery is something I thought about last year and did some work towards(the AI drawing of a smiling sunflower is one of my better results). I have recently come across two artists whose work in the area is really good, so I'm helping to promote their space. So if you buy one of their works, they also get a portion and you're helping support them too.

Finally, there's the "roofshot" projects. I'm not trying to take anything to the moon; merely achieving something off the ground is quite fine for now. My friends and I made a robot in a long weekend over a spring break last year(that was an unexpected perk of being a business owner), which has led to many more opportunities that I would write more about if it wasn't already almost tomorrow. (I promise I get sleep).

Ultimately I want this company to grow into a space where people can interact with humans, machines, and tools in a way that maximally allows them to experience self-actualization and gain knowledge about this amazing universe we live in. I'm not trying to make huge profits but I am trying to help improve the conditions of those around me, including our customers who ultimately benefit from our products and expertise.

P.S. Hackathon is a weekly get-together where some of my friends and I discuss our projects, what we're having problems with, and be in a positive learning environment. We've been doing it over 10 years and it's still going strong. 10 years ago we were talking about building quadcopters and working with those control algorithms, now I've got a robot that incorporates AI vision processing in the camera itself. Technology has been wild ever since You Only Look Once[https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02640]. I'm reminded of a great(okay, that doesn't narrow it down) XKCD that did not age well as a result of that paper: https://xkcd.com/1425/ . Anyway, I've got to get some rest now, as the actual real launch is coming up faster than I'd like.

News

Busy Life, Spooky Wife

Learning as We Go

Launch Day!

Pre-Launch Jitters

On Hackathon and Personal Growth