Stephen Hobley

Solar Cricket – finally, I get to build something…

September 13, 2013

It’s been a busy year so far – lots of stuff going on, and precious little time to build anything. A couple of months ago however I was asked by my buddies at MAKE magazine to put together an interesting little project. A solar powered chirping cricket – that uses solar energy to maintain the […]

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…a guest Post – Greg Weber on the Trotec Laser Cutter/Engraver

April 9, 2013

I’ve recently been talking with Greg Weber – the owner of a Trotec Speedy 300 laser machine. He offered to make a posting on the blog about some of the projects he’s been working on… Hi, my name is Greg and I’m the owner of a Trotec Speedy 300 laser machine. I love to work […]

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…a Goatskin drum (Bodhrán)

March 4, 2013

Ever since I saw Mike Oldfield remix the Blue Peter theme back in the 80′s I was fascinated with the strange looking drum be played half way through… It was only recently that I found out it was called a ‘Bodhrán’ [Bo-rawn] (which I’m told might mean ‘deaf’ but that was probably a joke, or […]

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FAME! I wanna live forever (etc…)

December 14, 2012

I just got an email from Pierre-Alain (thanks!) alerting me to the fact that my picture was being used to sell a sound font of the laser harp. Fancy that – I contacted the seller, and reported the posting to Ebay, but there doesn’t seem to be a policy about using pictures of people to […]

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Finally cutting something out

December 6, 2012

Built the enclosure, and hooked up fume extraction and air assist… This is cutting 1/8″ plastic – everything seems to work just fine – 3 passes and the pieces just drop right out. The cutting residue washes off with soap and water. UPDATE : I was looking for tips on identifying laser safe plastics and […]

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…Thorn’s Guitar, from the Hex Girls

November 27, 2012

Who are the Hex Girls? Obviously you’re not a Scooby Doo fan… My daughter LOVES the Hex Girls, and for Halloween she wanted to be the lead singer. So I decided to build her a guitar closely modeled on the one used by Thorn (or Sally McKnight). We started with the Batman logo from the […]

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…a new CO2 Laser cutter / engraver.

November 26, 2012
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Wow, been a long time since I posted about anything. I thought it was about time I wrote about something new. I recently acquired all the parts for a laser cutter – although I was running an 80W tube from the BlackToe gantry I found that the two machining techniques were at odds with each […]

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…custom electronic workbench

June 26, 2012

I’d been using an old dining table as a workbench for a long time – and it just wasn’t working out. The cables for all the test equipment kept getting tangled up, and it was too deep to be an efficient use of space. 20 minutes in to any project and it was a mess… […]

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Did anyone else catch the Hellraiser reference in last weeks Scooby Doo?

June 18, 2012
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I was watching the latest episode of Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated with my daughter last week and could not fail to spot this gratuitous reference to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. (Something I never thought I’d see). What was really interesting was that this was a 20 second vignette that had nothing to do with the regular […]

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The Transit of Venus

June 5, 2012

OK so it looks a lot like a black dot on the face of the sun, but you don’t see it very often… Taken with a Nikon D2X, 300mm zoom lens and a solar filter.

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