The Coolest Sand Table!

I was born an engineer and pursued engineering as a career from an early age. In high school, I was a member of ham radio Explorer Post 373 which met in the Bay View United Methodist Church, a few blocks from one of the Milwaukee Makerspace locations today. I eventually graduated from UW Milwaukee in 1981 with a degree in electrical engineering and embarked on a career that moved me to Illinois, California, Japan, and Texas. After 22 years at Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu Microelectronics, and Texas Instruments, corporate engineering and I had had enough of each other, and at 46 years old I decided to reinvent myself.

Six years of school followed, and in 2011, at the tender age of 52 years, I graduated from the Arizona School of Dentistry and Oral Health. In 2012 I returned to the Milwaukee area to work in a community health clinic and promptly joined the Milwaukee Makerspace. For the last five years, I have worked at Vivent Health, an organization that cares for HIV patients.

Work always interfered with my home engineering projects, and when I became a dentist, working just four days per week freed up an extra day for projects. My first project at the Makerspace was designing and building a 3D printer that was much larger than the kits that were available at the time. Over the next few years, I designed and built two more printers and managed the 3D printing area at the Makerspace.

I used the knowledge of 3D printing mechanisms and electronics, gained at the Makerspace, to design and build my first sand table, The Spice Must Flow, for display at the 2018 MakerFaire Milwaukee. There were lots of 3D-printed parts in the mechanism. After that initial success, I wanted to reduce the noise, increase speed, and build the mechanism into a piece of furniture I could use in my living room. The Arrakis sand table that can be seen at MakerFaire Milwaukee this year is the result. 

You can see a blog post on Arrakis here: https://drmrehorst.blogspot.com/2021/10/arrakis-this-is-part-of-weirding-way.html

And video of Arrakis drawing patterns here:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXhpuy8MGC9zTHcek2UMJyPuZjJ8RXrlK

 

Come see us at the MakerFaire in the Milwaukee Makerspace booth. I’ll be happy to answer questions about Arrakis, 3D printing, the Makerspace, teeth, and almost any other topic, personal or scientific.

DIY Modular Music Synthesizers

My name is Karl Stamm, I like to say I ‘am’ a Ph.D. of Computational Science because graduate school becomes such a big part of a person’s identity. I wanted to have an impact, do more good. I chose to study math as a force multiplier in lieu of any concrete ideas to ‘do more good’ in the world, and I ended up a data scientist supporting medical advancement. Now importantly, I’m also a dad and ultimately a Maker.

Basically, I spend a lot of time fighting computers to get data transformed from one shape to another. I needed to find a hobby that was not on keyboards and screens, yet still scratching that signals-processing itch. So about five years ago I got into modular synthesizers.

Musical synthesizers use analog or digital electronics to create sound and can have as much complexity as you want. “Modular” synthesizers are inside-out: those dozen major components of a musical synth are broken out into separate bits you can rearrange, replace and rewire to create unique sound-making machines every time you play. Musical instruments are expensive, and boutique electronics are expensive, so when the COVID pandemic closed my day job, I looked towards Do-It-Yourself electronics.

The basic components of a musical synthesizer were patented before I was born and designs are now available freely on the internet. The workings of an electronic filter are complicated and you might want an engineering degree to work out exactly how to make one perform, but in the case of noise-making, we don’t need precision and trial and error can get us close enough.
I was inspired by the YouTuber Sam Battle, AKA Look Mum No Computer, a reference to what crazy things you can build with really basic components. His motto said after every video, “don’t be scared to try it!” shows us that for the cost of burning up a few pennies worth of resistors and capacitors you can get an intuitive education on electronics design. All it takes is perseverance.

Initial circuits are soldered messes of wire. When they get too complicated, the transition to printed circuit boards is straightforward with free computer-aided drafting software and very cheap overseas fabrication services. They have a minimum order count of 5 or 10 boards, and I found myself duty-bound to set up a website to detail build instructions for anyone who gets a hold of a copy of one of my PCBs. Thus Karltron synthesizer company was born. Karltron.com sells circuit boards and parts kits to the DIY synthesizer community and assembled modules to musicians who appreciate unique hardware.

As a person who makes things in the Milwaukee community, I want to show the public both how electricity can be fun, and how sound synthesis works. I hope it inspires you that it’s not impossible to really make something you may have thought was intensely complicated just a few years ago. Don’t be scared to try it!