Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab

The monthly meeting of the CUCFL Business/Operations Committee will be held at 5:30 pm on April 4th, 2011 at the fab lab.  Join us if you can!

The Fab Lab will be closed from Monday 3/21 through Sunday 3/27 for Spring Break.  The Fab Lab open sessions will resume at the normal time (4pm-9pm) on Monday 3/28.

Damien Hernandez has constructed a cahedral out of gold colored matboard.  Here are some pictures of his laser cut sanctuary.

"The 10 to Watch series continues with industrial design graduate student, Johann Rischau, who will use the space as an experimental laboratory for investigating mass customization and our emotional connections to the objects we make and consume. He has produced a prototype for a computer-controlled router that processes visitors' brainwaves and imprints them on various materials. Viewers are invited to participate in the work by inputting their own brainwaves and leaving with an object that is made just for them.

10 to Watch is a year-long series curated by Jorge Lucero, Jimmy Luu and Tumelo Mosaka that brings relevant and engaging ideas from the School of Art + Design’s classrooms to a public forum."

Facebook Event Page:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=185315728175197

This project was developed by Johann Rischau and Robert McGrath with the support of the Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab and the NCSA.

The exhibition space will be open from 11th to 17th from 9-5pm (except 14th) and everybody is invited to stop by and interact with the machine.  The opening reception is on Friday, the 11th from 6-8pm.

• Video - Johann Rischau's Neuromaker
• Video - The Neuromaker: When Science Meets Design

A document explaining the project in all details is attached to this post.  See the footer of this post for details.

Note: This document is a very rough draft.  If you're a Mac OS X user who would like to access mcu.cba.mit.edu, please try it and let me know how well these instructions work be e-mailing me me (lukescharf@clusterbee.net) or by adding a comment to this page.

Inspired by a post on Adafruit Industries blog about someone who engraved "Don't Panic" on their Kindle 2, I decided to personalize the Kindle DX Graphite that I purchased to read large the huge stack of PDFs that my professors hand out in class.  This project turned out to be a mixed success; I hope that anyone thinking about using an Epilog laser can use what I've learned.

This should be VERY beginner friendly. Please feel welcome to come if you've never used Inkscape or have never come to the FabLab before. Please also come if you have used it extensively to share your experiences with the rest of us!

WHERE: We will meet among the computers in the FabLab. Bring a laptop with Inkscape (it's free!) on it if you have one, or use the computers which all have Inkscape installed.

WHEN: This Sunday, January 30, 3:30pm for about an hour.

Call for Submissions: Fab Yearbook 2011

Hello all, makers from around the FabLab community,

2011 is upon us. May you have a Fab year! It is time to start putting together your Fab YearBook 2011 contributions! Send in your contributions before February 1st 2011. Publication date is February 23rd 2011.

Mary K Watson writes:

The first presentation at the United States Fab Lab Network (USFLN) Annoual Symposium in Kansas City was done by the Rapid Tech.org which has the Bright Minds Mentoring program with teacher training workshop for educators They have four days of hands on experience to learn the secondary processes for using the machines and then how to use it in the classroom as well as industry seminars for companies. They have opened a fab lab and Fox Valley works with them on prototyping development.

These are some of the other presenters:

Betty Barrett writes:

Today Mary Kay, Mercedes, and I are at the USFLN conference in Kansas City. There are, perhaps, 50 to 60 people in attendance from 10 to 20 fab labs all at different stages of development. Here are some of the ideas that have come up so far that may be worth exploring at CUCFL.

Notes below the fold:

The monthly meeting of the CUCFL Business/Operations Committee will be held at 5:30 pm on February 7th, 2011 at the fab lab.  Join us if you can!

One of the newer people showing up here at the Fablab is Steve Holt. He had a great idea of what to make with laser etching. Steve had found pictures of a Buick and its chassis and wanted them on a mirror.

Jonathan Manton has written an Inkscape extension that, among other things, makes it easier to create polyhedra out of heavy paper that has been cut/scored using the Epilog Laser.

He writes:

I've developed an Inkscape extension to render the polyhedra nets I've been making the last few months. It can make nets for the platonic, archimedean, and archimedean dual solids. There are several options for tabs including tab and slot, no tabs (for showing rather that assembling), and a couple of options for tabs that can be glued.

The full writeup is here:
http://www.fabhub.net/entry.php?28-Inkscape-extension-for-polyhedra-nets