Arlington Plantation in Google Earth

The original Arlington Plantation was built on Old Plantation Creek here on the Eastern Shore by John Custis II, starting around 1670, and was allegedly the most sophisticated house on the Chesapeake...the home that eventually became Arlington Cemetery was named for it. Here are some links to more information on Arlington.

http://www.apva.org/resource/other/arling.html
http://www.esva.net/ghotes/arlington/index.html
http://familiesfound.tripod.com/custis.html


The building is long gone but my friend Harry is active in the Arlington Foundation and showed me some drawing of what they guess it looked like. It was a very interesting design and since I was just learning to use Sketchup I decided to do a model of it and place it in Google Earth. The model isn't finished yet but it's close enough to give you an idea of where it was and what it could have been like. If you're interested in seeing it, these are the steps to getting the model and placing it in teh correct location in Google Earth.

• You'll need Google Earth installed on your computer which is a very cool (and free) virtual model of the Earth. You'll need a somewhat fast internet connection and can download Google Earth from http://earth.google.com/
  
  
  
  
• Once you've installed Google Earth you can find the Arlington model in the Google 3D Warehouse. The direct link is here but you can also find it by going to http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/ and searching for "Arlington Eastern Shore".
  
  
  
• Once you've gotten to the page with the Arlington Model, click the button that says "Google Earth" in the download section and Google Earth will open and you'll be flown to the model's location. You may get a message box asking you what to do with the file...just say to open it in Google Earth which should be the default and you'll be in business.

New Sketchup Models of Shopbot projects

I've just uploaded Sketchup models of the ShopBot Workstation, Sawhorses, Rubber Band Racer, and Cabin Shelves to the Google 3d Warehouse. If you haven't tried Sketchup yet it's a great and easy to use 3d program that's now owned by Google, with both a free and a paid version.

You can download Sketchup from http://sketchup.google.com/download.html and then get those models to play with from the ShopBot section of the Google 3d Warehouse . That's where you'll also find the example models for ZomadiCAM, Rob Bell's open source toolset project written in Ruby for generating ShopBot files from within Sketchup.

Jamboree and Maker Faire

I've been on a couple of adventures in the last few months and wanted to catch up on postings. The first was a trip to San Mateo, CA for the ShopBot Jamboree and the Maker Faire. As usual I ended up missing much of the Jamboree while doing behind-the-scenes jobs...this year it was cutting a whole pile of rubber band racers to give out at the Maker Faire. My son came out for the Maker Faire as well so we also set up my ShopBot "Drawing Board" which was inspired by Hektor that uses stepper motors and the ShopBot Control software to draw pictures.

Showing off the Drawing Board

It was really fun showing the Drawing Board off to everyone since it's so simple but also kind of "sketchy", and drew a lot of pinstriping designs with it from the Vector Mega Clip Art collection to give out to kids. Since Steve Wozniak was one of the speakers at the Maker Faire I also had it draw a portrait of him from a photo on the web, but unfortunately he didn't stop by to autograph it!

Woz Portrait

The Maker Faire was amazing, with lots of cool machines, fascinating people, and general weirdness, but one of the best parts was meeting Bruce Shapiro of The Art of Motion Control, one of my heroes. He does amazing robotic art projects, many for museums, and it was great to get a chance to talk to him. I also got to met Rob Bell, a ShopBotter who's also a programmer and is doing some really neat work with generating ShopBot files from Sketchup called Zomadicam.

Rob showing me and Jimmy some Sketchup programming

The next Maker Faire will be in Austin, Texas on Oct 20-21 at the Travis County Fairgrounds. I'm already making plans to head down there...since the Fairgrounds has campsites I'm thinking about driving my camper...and we're looking into having some sort of ShopBot event(s) on the days before the Faire. I'll post here when we have something finalized so that you can put it on your calendars.


Although I flew to San Francisco for the Jamboree it certainly isn't my favorite way to travel and I've always wanted to take a long train trip. Figured this was my best opportunity so I decided to take the train all the way across the country to Virginia. Sounded like a good idea to Jimmy too so we got on the California Zephyr in Emeryville, CA and headed for Chicago. Although I was worried that it would be boring after a while, it turned out to be a lot of fun. A rockslide in Nevada held us up for almost 12 hours which made us miss our connection in Chicago, but Amtrak put us up in a nice hotel, gave us cash for cab rides and meals, and got us on the Capital Limited the next day headed to Washington, DC and then the Crescent to Charlottesville to pick up my truck to head home. I've posted some pictures on Flickr (sorry..they're not at all organized), but pictures don't do it justice. It was a great time.

The front of the train on a turn (taken from the back!)

Jimmy in the "Bubble Car"

A new widget (over there...toward the bottom on the right)

Meebo is a free, web based instant messanger service that I've been using recently, and they have a widget called "Meebo Me" that you can embed in a web page that let's anyone leave you a message or chat with you, even if they don't have an account with any of the instant messanger services like AIM.

I use IM infrequently...mostly to keep in touch with my son at college or for work-related projects... but thought it was a neat idea so stuck one in the sidebar as an experiment. Be warned that I type VERYYYY slowly so chatting with me can be painful, but if you see that I'm online (or even if I'm not), send me a message.

ShopBot Labs

I tend to be somewhat...well...scattered and always have a bunch of projects in the works in various states of completion. The thing that tends to stall them more than anything is the final testing...making sure that I didn't forget to test for some obscure combination of settings or options.

My solution is pretty much a direct ripoff of Google Labs called ShopBot Labs, a place where we can stick just about anything that needs a little more input and testing. Several of the projects in there have been "promoted" to the full software install already, making room for new ones. If you're a ShopBot owner check it out...you may find something interesting.