Light Painting and Long Exposures

Light painting, a term used in photography where lights are painted in the air where the camera is on long exposure. The camera captures available light and processes into one image giving very extraordinary results. Most, if not all pictures you'll see of the stars from the surface of the Earth were taken by long exposures.

Here's a few of my long exposures. I need to get some neutral density filters for doing exposures in the day time as my camera's F/stop value doesn't restrict the aperture enough.

Nunchakus with a brighter light, softer lights work better

8 seconds

8 seconds, 2 torches on bike spokes

8 seconds, 1 torch on nunchakus

Simplicity 

When it gets a bit more winterish I want to do a few long exposures of some of my rocket launches and do a few of pyrotechnics.

Syclone II Xbox 360 Chassis Mod Experience

Ever since I purchased an Xbox 360, I had always seen the mods and skins that people did to their consoles for various reasons, mainly for looks. Some people go a bit further and modify for expansions or even tinkering with the software and hardware like Jtagging.

When I did work experience (it's mandatory at my school) as a computer technician at the local computer store I saw the "gaming" PC chassis for custom build or upgrades for computers every time I walked into and out of the store. One of them I like quite a bit, the Aerocool Syclone II chassis. This chassis looks like a jet or spacecraft from the future, smooth but sharp design with LEDs.

I contemplated on the risk of ruining my Xbox 360 in pulling it apart and causing some sort of damage to it somehow. 

Then I decided, I purchased the chassis and stripped my Xbox 360 down and figured out how I'd do it. I done the mod to improve the cooling of the Xbox 360 (although it is the Falcon chipset, they can never be too cool), allow for expansion and to make it look far cooler of course.

The motherboard obviously was a good fit in the mounts of the PC chassis but the CD drive and the hard drive cables were far too short. I had to mount the hard drive on the steel grate of the Xbox's inner chassis and insulate it so any electricity from the exposed PCB didn't run through. Then to the CD drive, it had about 12 or so (from memory) little wires which made up the cable, since it wasn't long enough I cut and extended each individual wire. The CD drive then got mounted where CD drives go in your average chassis. The on switch of the console, if left the way it was would have proven very difficult to physically turn on the console when it was mounted in the chassis. So I had to hand solder 2 wires to 2 of 4 of the switches connecters to complete the circuit, this was the riskiest move as the soldering was a bit too big two solder something the size of a grain of sand. Once the wires were soldered to the switch, I spliced them to the actual on/off switch of the PC chassis, which is part of the spine up the top of the chassis.

Once I had the console parts out of the way, I had to find a power supply for the LEDs and the fans. After trolling around my pile of useful stuff, I found an old phone charger which gave adequate output to run 8 LEDs and 6 fans of the chassis.

After about 4 hours I had it all going well, just had to cut out two of the little separating things at the back of the chassis where PCI stuff usually goes into the motherboard so I could fit my ethernet cable in there well.


And here is what it looked like the day I finished it. It looks pretty much the same now just has a bright red LED in the centre of the intakes down the bottom which I finally got a resistor so it my power supply wouldn't burn the little LED out straight away. 

 
My favourite game would have to be Halo: Reach... And I think that the style of my 360 matches Halo pretty well.

Set the Scene

For the last year or so I have been interested in photography, I started off with a simple point and shoot digital camera which fulfilled my needs well until I asked for the level up for as a birthday wish.
I got a digital bridge camera, the cross between an SLR and a digital camera.

Down the main road




From then on I've been taking a fair few of photos around where I live, the skies, the ground, the animals, water and anything really. I wish to enter some of the local art galleries and the local annual festival to show off a few of my photos.

Small cracks in the ground as the winter season comes

The 23cc Gears of War Chainsaw Lancer

Back in October 2010 I was inspired by the excellent video game series Gears of War that I'd actually make my own chainsaw lancer. This "lancer" on the game itself is a sort of assault rifle that has a chainsaw where the bayonet should be on a rifle that has bayonet lugs. The chainsaw, instead of a normal bayonet blade is used to kill Locust, the large humanoid things that you shoot at through the course of the game while spraying blood and stuff everywhere.



And the video just below is where I got.

I used some galvanized patio tubing and 1.5mm steel plate to make most of the chassis of the "lancer." ... And a CHAINSAW of course. A little Paulan 23cc 2 stroke chainsaw from about 20 years ago. No, it doesn't fire any projectiles unless you count the saw-dust of whatever is being cut as bullets.
It took me about 8 hours (about an hour each day after school of course) total to make the chassis and disassemble the saw then put it together the way it would work.



It's actually very dangerous - funny that, so I'd suggest you don't try and make your own unless you know what you're doing.