I spent a few days last week at a friend's house on Hutchinson Island, where I indulged my artistic side by stacking stones and shells on beach rocks after the manner (at least in my own small way) of Andy Goldsworthy. Hopefully somebody enjoyed it before the tide came in!

Lacking an insert plate for the 10-inch Delta bandsaw (model 28-195) at work, I made a new one out of ABS plastic using our 3D printer. Here's the result:

Rough-but-ready output from the Solidoodle

The geometry is two discs stacked on top of each other with a little bit of a cutout at the edge behind the blade, which helps prevent the insert from twisting too much. I've modeled a slot a bit larger than the kerf of the blade and included it in the printed part but you could certainly leave that off and cut the slot into the insert using the bandsaw itself, making what's called a “zero-clearance” insert.

I'm starting another AVR project using my by-now-venerable STK500 and the latest 6.1 version of Atmel's Studio software. Although I'm sure Atmel would like all developers everywhere to buy STK600s, it's perfectly possible to use the older development kit with the newest software, although this combination is not as well documented as I'd like; hence I'm using this post to collect a few tips distilled from recent experience.

Regular followers of this blog or of my flickr account perhaps noticed an enormous improvment in the quality of my macro photos about a year ago; at the time I put together a primitive light tent using foamcore and tissue paper. Although the photographic results of this project were all I could hope for, the tent itself was extremely fragile, awkward to set up, and likely to collapse while shooting. So I took what I learned from my first effort and built an improved tent with a PVC-pipe frame and a bedsheet light diffuser.

Looking at photographs from my recent trip to Copenhagen I conclude I must have spent a lot of my time in churches! Here are some of the results: