LED Industrial Piercing | Hacker News Reader

LED Industrial Piercing

mitxela.com

340 pointsblutack61 comments

Sad that he lost access to his marker space, and the equipment he used to make this project. I feel like hacker spaces, especially with industrial and metal working equipment, are on the decline. Am I over fitting on the tragedy of TechShop in the SF Bay area, or are folks observing this in other places too?

It's definitely happening across swaths of the US. Maker spaces have high positive externalities but low margins and require a lot of work and upkeep. With rent prices shooting through the roof and redevelopment taking cheap shop space offline maker spaces are getting squeezed out.

I find it heartbreaking but it seems inevitable. Not a lot of people want to keep an old building available for rent when they can sell the property for redevelopment into "luxury" apartments or condos.

It's definitely more than just SF.

Up here in Portland (well really the western suburbs) we had a rather ambitious TechShop start up about a decade and a half ago, but they didn't last a year. I made a decent sized donation at the start because I liked what they were doing, and took some great classes there on woodworking and CNC. The woodworking instructor in particular was really interesting as he was an old school pattern maker (patterns for casting) which involves different techniques than finish or furniture carpentry. He could build to 1/64" tolerances by using various combinations of sanders, including a stationary disc sander with a 1 yard diameter. That thing was a pretty cool piece of equipment.

Unfortunately I'm sad to say besides the finances they had some cultural issues. A few of the instructors went pretty heavy on the "boys club" style humor in a way that would clearly alienate a lot of women.

Double Union is a women-only makerspace in the Mission in San Francisco because there's something about makerspaces that they seem to trend in that direction, so a women-only makerspace is necessary.

https://doubleunion.org/

I ran into the Maker Nexus booth at Maker Faire two months ago. The person I spoke to claimed that they were the successor of TechShop. I don't know if that's true, and I haven't used them, but it's worth checking out: https://www.makernexus.org/aboutus

it's a nonprofit, that's promising

I live in a place where it didn't really take off like some regions. There are a few with some equipment, but whenever I really inquired it was kind of "we have it, but nobody can use it themselves".

I totally understand though. People don't realize how expensive precision metalworking stuff is. And that's before you start to insure the place.

For something like a really rigid CNC (not a desktop sized one or for wood), someone needs to come up with a reasonable cost machine that can hold thous and has a spindle that isn't stupidly overpriced.

CNC machines are roughly a commodity product, and the makers of CNCs are giving you the best they can on the price-quality-features curve. It's not that nobody is trying to give you great precision for cheap.

Right. Even a machine like the Tormach 440, which is pretty close to the minimal steel-cutting machine, contains nearly 200kg of cast iron. That, plus lead screws, motors, etc needed to move it around add up quickly.

A while back I looked into building my own, and ended up with a Tormach because I couldn't compete on price. There are a couple near that price point now, but going transformatively cheaper seems very hard.

Lathes are easier. The C4 class is both quite cheap and impressively capable (much more than the cheaper C3 mini lathe class).

Yeah, as a general rule, fewer moving parts makes a tool cheaper, and lathes are at one end while CNC mills are at the other.

100% they're just not a profitable business

It's unfortunate, but also not surprising. These cropped up in some of the most expensive real estate markets on the planet with no particularly good prospect for long-term sustainability.

At first, you have an influx of excited members, so it feels like you have a shot at it - but within a couple of years, most of them drop out. They either get discouraged, or they find their groove and really want the convenience and flexibility of working on their own schedule with their own tools that aren't abused by strangers.

If you want to run a Makerspace in Portland, Seattle, or in the SF Bay Area, you better have an endowment from a wealthy donor, a long-term government grant, or something of that sort.

I would assume that the market for makerspaces is mostly in the centers of cities, where people can't get a big project space for themselves without paying exorbitant amounts of money.

Of course, that market has other problems - cost and neighbors who don't want 24/7 power tool use - but it's better than the alternative where anyone serious about their hobby can easily build their own shop.

It's a shame that the economics don't quite work out.

Things like milling machines are expensive, and spend 99%+ of hours unused in home shops.

On the flipside, accountability and safety are expensive in shared spaces.

The best version of this that I've usually seen is where 10 people who want to work on cars rent a shared space and provide shared tooling.

It would be neat to see votech programs/community colleges fulfill some of this role, particularly as a "meeting space for makers."

ALTSpace in Seattle is still breaking even after twelve years, with no such endowments or grants. As you say, the membership has completely cycled through several times since the start, and there was a major spinoff several years in where several members pulled out to form their own, more private workspace. You have to expect all that and plan for it; you'll need a new generation of leadership every few years, and recruiting new members needs to be an ongoing process.

covid blow + capital costs on real estate has increased 3x over last year or so. it's expected.

Seems like everything in the bay area is shutting down, no?

Omni Commons in Oakland is at a critical juncture in its history and we may lose the building in 2024. I was just at a rather passionate three hour meeting about it yesterday.

And then there was American Steel…

You’re not imagining things. It’s hard to sustain places like this when private equity firms are buying up all the land to build high end apartments.

While the loss of American Steel was a huge loss to its community, it wasn't a maker space in the style of Techshop. The biotech labs that now live under its roof pay much more in rent than the artists who were there before ever could.

I was at the opening day of the first Techshop, so I know that space well. What I have heard from my burner friends is that American Steel was a place where regular people could (I assume through renting space) store their project materials and fabricate their metal art, even very large scale metal art. That sounds like exactly the kind of place where the OP could work on an LED industrial piercing.

It sounds like there were some differences in the membership structure, but American Steel was bought by a private equity firm, the existing tenants were kicked out, and now as you say the new VC funded firms bring in far more income than poor artists ever could. That sounds like exactly the kind of loss to our community that we suffered when Techshop went under.

Techshop you could go in the front door and take lessons and just use their equipment. American Steel was home to a number of burner art collectives, which, while friendly, weren't groups you could just go in and rent equipment time from without already knowing somebody. If OP knew the right people they could definitely work on an LED industrial piercing, though as as large warehouse of a metal shop, it was dirty place simply due to metal shavings and oil in the air, and not someplace I would want to work on jewelry at unless I had a container to work in.

I was being nitpicky that AmSteel got biotech put in place rather than housing, not that it didn't get gentrified.

I see that there are some differences in access. Another way of looking at it is that both places allowed a large number of local people to work on their art or engineering projects, and that a loss of such places is a loss for people who want to make things.

I’ve done a lot of metal working. It’s a messy process using cutting oils etc. But once you’ve cut and shaped the metal as desired you wash it with soap and water in the sink before assembly.

Yeah, the London Hackspace lost their building as it was being demolished for new development in the area. They're currently trying to rebuild in a temporary location in Park Royal for anyone interested: https://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/view/London_Hackspace

I loved TechShop while it lasted, it was so great. They were two blocks away from me, I could treat it almost like "my shop", just walking over to do small tasks as I worked around the house.

But as others noted, it is not an attractive business. High fixed costs, you're significantly more optional than gym subscriptions to many people, and your best customers naturally tend to graduate to owning their own.

It's global. Hacker spaces as a pay per use venue never made a financial sense. It's membership only coffee shop that caters to an ultra niche group, but can't charge the proportionately exorbitant amount that corresponds to the nicheness.

Tampa must be an exception. They’ve quadrupled the size of their space in the past few years, expanding into every adjacent unit in the building. It’s probably about 10,000 ft^2 now and still only $50/mo. Obviously rent is cheaper here.

Taking a quick look at Tampa, at least one thing I'm noticing that I don't see in others, is that there's a significant focus on the FIRST competition, which gives the maker space a continued source of involvement and recruits every year.

Similar competitions (solar car, concrete canoe, pinewood derby, hackathons, yearly DEFCON attendance, 4-H robotics, Zero robotics, INTEL/GOOGLE/Microsoft/ThermoFischer science fairs, math olympiads, science olympiads) might be reasonable draws for other maker shops.

Grants for STEM are mostly gone as are corps willing to fund. First thing to go is charity, doesn't matter that tech is the wealthiest corps in the world they hoard it and pretend to be poor. A natural result of these same corps owning your politicians. Go to Europe if you want to not be a grinded gear in the corrupt machine.

Such a big fan of this guy. Found him through his UV protection amulet project: https://mitxela.com/projects/amulet

By coincidence, I found out about him through the “Smallest USB-C MIDI Synth” on Youtube just today.

I bought and built the clock kit, it's great!

A 3mA draw seems high even for this circuit. Maybe putting the LEDs on a constant duty cycle PWM would reduce current consumption, oftentimes attainable without any reduction in perceived brightness.

I wonder if it's possible to also have a series resistor between the battery and microcontroller to bring it down to its lower end of acceptable voltage range for longer. Just a thought.

3 mA doesn't seem terribly far from the ballpark for always-on LEDs, even PWM-ed. The battery choice is kind of peculiar, though. A hearing aid battery with a small boost converter for the LEDs should give you several days of power per battery, and is about the same size as the battery used here.

Very cool! Have definitely thought about this for mine, have never actually gotten past looking around and seeing nobody makes them yet. It'd be amazing to throw some bluetooth on there and be able to flash different patterns, or to throw a fullblown mini screen on it...

I wonder how hard it would be to make a set of large-gauge lobe jewelry with a screen in it. Perhaps 1/2" or 3/4" would be doable?

A thought re sales and sizing, though: industrials are usually sold in quarter-inch increments and most people buy 1-2.5" from what I understand, so it should be doable to make them to sell.

A screen requires a loooot more grunt than this microprocessor, not to mention a lot more battery power and supporting components.

At best you could probably do a small low-res (8x8?) LED matrix with some programmed patterns but even that would require more batteries etc than this and get exponentially heavier.

You just gotta gauge your lobes out enough to fit a smartwatch.

The model that the user can interact with to rotate and pan on this website performed amazingly.

yeah, I was really impressed too. using three.js and .wrl files (vrml I guess, hello again 01994)

the one-finger orbit and 2-finger pan and zoom was fantastic and intuitively obvious. with a mouse it's left-button orbit, right-button pan, and mousewheel zoom, which is not as immediately obvious but still pretty usable

https://mitxela.com/other/3d/loader.js?2

view-source:https://mitxela.com/img/uploads/metal/scaffold/scaffold-case...

incidentally meshlab knows how to open .wrl files, and the loader on this page also supports .stl

surprisingly, this is not a hack of modelviewer.dev, though it uses the same tag name and underlying 3-d library. it supports different model formats and is an independent effort. https://mitxela.com/projects/model-viewer is a page from last month by jacobs about it

no license visible tho, which is a shame because it's awesome and i'd like to be able to use it. still, not that hard to reimplement i guess? now that jacobs has done all the hard and non-copyrightable work of figuring out what kind of user interface and programming interface works best for this

Ironically it gives me late '90s vibes, there was some tech (mostly for the cool factor?) where you could import basic 3D objects into web pages and perform like basic rotations.

I feel like it may have been like some XML format (VRML?), but I may be misremembering and it may have just been Java applets...

This guy is really churning out awesome projects right now (or at least the videos for them).

I got his satellite clock kit for the office and love it!

Great video, awesome execution and I'm really grateful for how much mitzela shares.

That said, I'm always sad to get shot in the eyeball by bare LEDs.

After giving this idea a little thought, I'd love to see an iteration that diffuses the LED light through the skin...

Wow - subtly glowing ears, noses, lips, etc?!

Beautiful. You're so humble, but this is really creative and inspiring.

I can't see in the article any mention of the metal type used where there is skin contact. Metal for piercings can't be any old thing as people can develop allergies to the metal, usually from the nickel leaching out. Apparently that can get pretty nasty. The usual stainless steel formulation is something called 316L, I hope the guy used that, or something similarly suitable.

He used syringe, presumably medical one.

The end caps are nickel coated brass

Very cyber punk. Can’t wait for the age of cybernetics

Johnny Mnemonic: These can smuggle data, surveillance, etc.

It will be an interesting world when Sneaker Nets are the safest smuggle.

There is enough room in the end cap for an electronic compass that clicks when you turn your head past a cardinal point.

With a strong enough magnet, instead, just its torque might be enough to train yourself to.

Why not hang the battery on a chain as part of the design?

I’ve often wondered why smart watches don’t have battery link bands… seems you could add a ton of capacity in a fashionable way.

Some smartwatches/fitness trackers have had the battery in the band - such as the Microsoft Band.

It seemed to result in a fairly thick and inflexible strap, with limited length adjustment. It was generally panned by reviewers for its bulk, although a microsoft-loving large-wristed friend of mine reported it was just fine.

Batteries are heavy, it'd whip around your ear. As someone who used to have an industrial, I can't imagine it'd be comfortable.

I read the title as LED Industrial Pricing, and was initially confused but definitely not disappointed.

I was surprised that these did not already exist. Great work and great write-up!

I don't understand how people learn to do this sort of machining, PCB design, etc from nothing, with no machines or tools or anything. Any pointers?

Lots of entry points, but the best way is to just start a project that’s simple and learn as you go. Electronics have gotten pretty accessible with arduinos, rpi, circuitpython boards etc. machining does take shop time to learn. Friends, maker spaces, school shops, all are options but that’s hard. Sometimes you don’t need much to get going.

Usually starts with "this can't be THAT hard to add this to my project, let's try it". Six months later you've got a solid working knowledge of running a lathe and you've started teaching workshops to other hackerspace folk on how to run it because everyone has seen you running that machine and needs help on it. Then you realize you forgot to finish the project that sent you down this road in the first place. You get bored and stop using the lathe for a few months. "Hey, it can't be that hard to design a PCB for this project, lets do some of that now..." Six months later you're teaching workshops on it...

And then years down the road you know how to make most things from scratch from the electronics design, PCB gerbers, and the enclosure both in metal (both machined and fabricated), laser cut, and 3D printed. But just conjuring up any cool thing you want to make summons a mental spreadsheet of the time it will take to complete the project, possibly including making a small-run of extras to sell for much less than your time is worth, and then you set your drink back down and shake your head because ain't no one got time for that any more. And then you buy the Etsy/Kickstarter version instead because you realize they have woefully underpriced their super cool widget.

I feel seen. I'm lucky to have all the resources in the world except time and naivete

Regarding machining, you can/should read a lot of books but you're not going to learn how to run a mill or a lathe without getting your hands on one.

I took engineering tech and welding classes at my local community college as a non-matriculated student.

With KiCAD and dirt-cheap PCB manufacturing, the PCB design is just a matter of starting with something simple. It took me a (long) evening to go from nothing to an VGA I2C Atari joystick controller board. [1]

Once you've got the hang of it, more complex PCBs aren't really that much different.

I started with double-sized PCBs, but 4-layer PCBs are now almost equally cheap, which makes routing a lot easier too.

[1] https://tomverbeure.github.io/2019/02/05/VGA-I2C-My-First-PC...

You don't need a certification that attests your knowledge on the labor market when you are doing something as a hobby. I know it sounds weird, but you can just do it and fail and repeat until you can.

The hardest part by far is figuring out what you want to do. Even if you think you want to do a hundred different things and you can't do them all, you still have to figure out what you want to do.

You can actually learn it all from YouTube videos and ChatGPT. (I was in your position.)

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