Sam Neill Furr

I use this site to document some of my projects. Feel free to get in touch for more details.

• Stool Project

  

  My sister is an artist. Her focus is mainly on oil painting and portraits, however she recently started using a hot knife to cut construction foam into different shapes to paint on. People seemed to really like her “shaped” artwork, however the process of manually cutting out the shapes each time is quite tedious work. This got me thinking if there were some easy way I could help her produce these shapes. I landed on the idea of some sort of CNC machine, but somehow much cheaper than most of the traditional types. I found a pretty novel design that the open source community had been iterating on, called the ‘Maslow’ CNC. It works by suspending the cutting part (in our case a Makita router) on two chains on an angled work surface, so the position of the cutter could be identified by chain length and work surface size, its actually a really elegant solution. I went ahead and ordered some parts, and built one in the basement of my parents’ house, which doubles as my sister’s art studio.

  

  

  

  

  With the machine constructed and working great for cutting out foam, I had some growing ideas of what else the CNC could be used for. I got to work in Shapr3D designing a simple flat-pack stool that I could use to test tolerances and plywood cutting on the machine. After a few iterations, I now have side tables/stools for my living room, as well as for my sister’s art project.

  

  

  

  

  I had some friends come to stay with us for a week, and they loved the stool design, so I promised I would mail them one. After a few months, our friends got married and I still hadn’t sent them a stool. I was working on an updated stool design, to really push the limits of my woodworking ability, but to also test out PCBWay’s CNC aluminum feature. With one inch thich leg pieces, compound curve stool seat, and inlaid aluminum pieces, this was definitely a project that took me longer than expected. I started out building a rough prototype using construction foam and 3D printed pieces as stand-ins for the aluminum and wood.

  

  

  

  

  

  After a few months though, and tracking down some nice marine-grade mahogany plywood, it was finally assembled and looking great. I built a custom cardboard box with custom foam cutouts to keep it stable in shipping.

  

  

  

  

  

  The finishing touch were my friends’ initials on the middle piece of Aluminum. When my friends first got it, they had no idea I had made it until I showed them some work in progress pictures! They were pretty impressed, and their cat loves the custom box and foam.

  

  

  

  

  

  Next up, an easier to build design, that might also include more inlaid aluminum…

• Sculpture Project (Scalable multiplayer platform)

  

  As a project that I might want to use myself for any sort of massively multiplayer game I would want to make, I composed an architecture for a multiplayer platform that is cheap to run and can scale out seamlessly to handle as many players as you can throw at it. With client-facing websocket nodes written in Rust that can seemlessly scale on GCP, and a backend made from sharded Redis cluster instances, there are no performance troubles with many connections from around the world. With optimizations for shifting origins on the client-side and using octal trees to manage positions on a greater scale, the potential play area can be as large as you could ever want it (universe-scale). With many more optimizations relating to tracking velocity and further time derivatives, this has been a fun project to tinker with in the off-hours. The entire project is run with docker containers, from the dev environment to production.

• Home k8s/ceph Cluster

  

  

  To host my ever-growing collection of pet projects, home automation, media management, and site hosting, I designed and built a “highly available” (highly available enough for me) kubernetes/ceph cluster using 7 low-power arm64 nodes, each with their own redundant storage and redundant battery backup. The case for the system is made from laser-cut walnut, PVC, and standard threaded rod from McMaster-Carr. It automatically connects to the city WIFI and tunnels to a cloud server if it ever sees home connection down. Though completely overbuilt, it gives me the perfect home test-bench for networking and infrastructure.

• Homebrew CPU

  EagleCAD, 74XX logic design, electronics

  

  I started dreaming of creating my own processor from low level logic circuits during grade school, however it wasn’t until recently that I gained the skills necessary to design and manufacture the printed circuit boards for it. This project consists of four 8-bit registers and a basic ALU, as well as a bus board so far. I plan on designing and creating the instruction register and related circuitry next.

• How do you feel? (social platform)

  Ruby on Rails, PostgresQL, Jquery, Sass (CSS), Javascript, HTML

  

  This was a really fun project to work on. The number of iterations the design went through allowed me to experiment with art styles and my own artistic taste before landing on this design choice. Working with Ruby on Rails and PostgresQL also allowed me to flex my muscles with back-end design in order to vastly improve the function of the site.

• Transistor Logic Gates

  EagleCAD, circuit design

  

  An earlier project of mine, but one where I probably learned the most. These small circuit boards are individual logic gates, built using single 2N222 transistors and 10K resistors. Learning the ins and outs of transistor datasheets and circuit design was fun and satisfying.

• Go, Grandpa!

  C#, Unity3D, Android, iOS

  

  This is a mobile-first 2D sidescrolling game based on some of the flash games my friends and I used to play a long time ago when we first became fascinated with computers. With playful mechanics and simple art style, Go, Grandpa! was a fun game to develop as well as still play.

• Speeks (socket-based web chat)

  Node.JS, Express, Socket.IO, Jquery, Sass (CSS), Javascript, HTML

  

  Working with Node.JS and Socket.IO for this project was extremely fun and satisfying. I always liked Javascript, but getting to use it for back-end work as well was great. Since Speeks.us uses sockets to chat between people, no actual chat data gets stored on the main server.

• Mobile Design Study

  Sketch, Adobe CC, Balsamiq

  

  During my schooling, I took a set of mobile design courses that led me through the process of designing a modern, responsive mobile app from start to finish in a thorough and professional way. The iterations and process for this were based closely on the methods of professional mobile design shops.

• Last.fm top 10 (data aggregator)

  React, Chart.js, Sass (CSS), Javascript, HTML

  

  After learning React as well as Redux, I spent a weekend creating this single-page React app that plots how the various artists in your Last.FM weekly top 10 shift around over time. Because this was done using React, it came together incredibly quickly and cleanly. I rather enjoy working with React.