Been ages since I paid proper attention to my site.  Sorry about that!

Lots of things have happened including my laptop failing when I plugged it in when I was in Berlin recently.  I guess the power supply was not as universal as it was supposed to be.  Back up and running, thanks to my extended warranty on my Dell.  A nice fellow came out to fix it.

My wife Sally and I had a great trip to Berlin and Hungary.  We were invited to a symposium on “Light Art” in Pecs, Hungary. More on that in a later post.

ArcAttack had their run on Americas Got Talent.  They did amazingly well considering they did it with very little money!

I assisted with  a few things including some new more powerful LED arrays for the drum set and some woodwork for the Lightning proof MIDI guitar and the platforms for the last show.  It was great fun to throw in to help.  The creation of the Midi guitar in such a short time was truly amazing.  Here is a link with some more detail: Gizmodo

Here are a couple of photos from my phone:

Lots of water under the bridge since last posting, sorry for the delay.

Sally and I were well absorbed in two events. The East Austin Studio Tour took place November 14th – 27th.  Sally was also preparing for a show at the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center in San Antonio.

Our studio was open both weekends for the tour. (ours was number 59) It was a lot of work to get ready.  I was working on new photos from our California trip and I built a new set of actuators for a new drum set to join the one I made for Arcattack. I rented another drum kit and John DiPrima programmed some songs. I also helped Sally with framing her work.

Photo from Don’s Photo stream:

In between the two weekends of the E.A.S.T. Arcattack played a gig at UT in front of the Tower. At least 1500 students showed up. We had the two drum sets in front of the stage. I say we but I didn’t help set-up but I helped pack it up at the end.
Search on YouTube for “Arcattack UT” and you can find some video of the event.

I’ve added two new videos to the Gallery so take a look.  These were the sequences played during EAST.

Sally’s show in San Antonio is up through February 13.  You can see more about the show here.

Cheers!

My wife Sally and I just returned from a great, 10 day trip up highway one, north of San Francisco.   Sally had not seen the redwoods and I have fond memories of family vactions, so it seemed time for a road trip.  We also took the opportunity to visit some dear friends in the lost coast area, south of Eureka.

I hauled my 4×5 camera with me.  It’s a custom camera I built years ago, based on a 75mm Schneider Super Angulon lens and some surplus camera parts.  It’s a compact camera for a 4×5, but it has no shift or tilt adjustments.  It has a rare helical mount made specifically for this lens by Schneider.  It took me about 4 months to get the part when I ordered it.

Here is a Photo from the trip and a shot of the camera.  I’ve spent most of the day scanning about 20 shots from the trip.  I scan the negatives at 3200 dpi so they end up about 475 megabytes per shot.  Lots of pixels!

I’ll put up some of the photos in my blog gallery in a few days. (I do sell prints)

I finished it!

The new kit has all metal components and attaches quickly to any drum set.  The controller is now more compact and contained in an off-the-shelf LMB chassis.   I now have a full set of drawings for the actuators and the controller design and a full parts list.

My goal was to finish it in time to ship out to Abu Dabi with the Arcattack crew. I had hoped to shoot some nice photos and a video before it had to ship out but I ran out of time.  That will have to wait till September when they return from their Europe tour.

Check out ArcAttack’s web site for show dates.

Here are a few pics from my phone camera:

Hi,

My name is Craig Newswanger.
I hope to use this blog to share my projects and ideas.

Bear with me as I learn to use the various features of WordPress.

Tesla coil sparks up close.