Back after a long break

I'm back after a long break and now with a few more skills under my hat. My render box had a hard drive failure nearly 2 years ago and I had not got around to getting it fixed. In the last 8 months I have been learning some electronics and this blog will now cover my tinkering along with my CGI and art and graffiti. Last weekend I decided enough was enough and time to get the render box back in action and did a little research and found out the hard drive failure was due to bad firmware on the drive. After a little more research I found out there was a fix involving talking directly to the drive via TTY. So some more research shows that my Arduino boards use USB serial to TTY for programming. So I shorted out the reset switch which stuck the Arduino processor in a frozen state and hard wired the serial pins straight into the hard drive via a bodged, temporary cable and after 30 minutes of stressing, viola , one working hard drive and one resurrected render box. So to mark the occasion I thought I would upload the one bit of CGI related imagery I have done over the last 2 years and it looks poor but it is very cool. The image below is a capture from my Xbox Kinect which has scanned my living room into a full 3D point cloud and then rendered out via MeshLab.