Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab

The Fab Lab will be closed Sunday May 26.  Enjoy the Memorial Day holiday!

Regular hours will resume Tuesday May 28.

(Jeff and Andrew will not be holding Volunteers-Only lab hours on Monday)

Possibly of interest:  An NSF sponsored collection of high quality scanned specimens (skeltons and fossils).  The datasets are availalbe in a number of formats, some of them are available in STL, intended for 3D printing.

The Digital Morphology library is a dynamic archive of information on digital morphology and high-resolution X-ray computed tomography of biological specimens.

The CUC Fab Lab contributed to a special Augmented Reality installation for the University of Illinios graduation ceremonies.

See the official press release and visit the site Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to see it in person. see the 'About' page and the student pix.

This project was a collaboration of many departments at the UI, and the team included Robert McGrath and Andrew Knight of the Fab Lab.

Following up on the HASTAC presentation mentioned here, I have posted a much longer, more throrough discussion.

See the link at: http://robertmcgrath.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/draft-white-paper-communit...

I would like to revise and improve this draft.

(By the way, I couldn't find a good "Section" for this entry.  "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.")

On Saturday I presented a short talk about the CUCFL at the HASTAC 2103 conference in Troronto (Abstract).  Thanks to all of you who directly or indirectly helped.

I met folks from several Canadian makerspaces, and gave out our card to several of them.  Most of them were just starting out and wanted advice about how to build a successful makerspace.  I invited them to peruse our web site for tutorials, etc. and contact us.

Possibly of interest: a project from the Mixed Reality Lab at Keio University.  From this description, we could probably replicate it--though I don't know if we would want to.  :-)

See their web page for an explanation:

http://ringu.mixedrealitylab.org/

I ran across this paper that explains one way to calculate support structures for 3D printing. 

http://cybertron.cg.tu-berlin.de/rapid_prototyping_11ws/slicer/

I found it relatively clear and easy to understand.

Of course, there are more than one way to skin this cat, so this isn't necessarily the way any given software works.

This is pretty cool:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/next-4-d-printers/?src=twrhp

The Creation Tech program at The Urbana Free Library has begun! 

There will be a series of workshops in February and March.  Check it out.

http://urbanafreelibrary.org/blogs/2013/01/31/creation-technology-your-l...

Instructables featured this project this weeK:

http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-BioPrinter

From the BioPrinter Community Project at BioCurious.

What could possibly go wrong?

Short article about CUCFL in Buzz.

http://readbuzz.com/arts/2012/craft-man-do-and-so-can-you

Every year the Fab Academy conducts a rigorous semester long class based on the MIT course, with remote participants working in local Fab Labs around the world.

CUCFL hosted a Fab Academy class in 2011.

If there is enough interest, we could try to have one in Jany 2013.

We need to get several (probably 3 or more) people to sign up (Note:  there is a $3-5000 tuition.) and we will need to recruit a "guru" to be the local expert here.

For more information see:

http://www.fabacademy.org/application-form/

New for Halloween:  small dinaosaur, to cut from pressboard.

Purchase a 6x12 in piece of pressboard from the lab attendant, then download the files.  The file 'ptero-small.pdf' is all you need.

Use the Epilog Mini laser to make your own dinosaru today!

I made a small Jack'o'lantern on the new UP! printer.

The project was downloaded from Thingiverse, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4494 by DocProfSky. The STL file is in the Downloads folder on the UP! machine.

Help Wanted:  This Jack'o'lantern is intended to have a light inside, e.g., a LED and battery.  I need some folks to help finish this part of the project.

Possibly of intrest, the Illinois Green Business Association is having its first 'Green Business Summit', Sept 7, 2012 in Champaign.

For more info and registration, please see:

http://illinoisgba.com/Summit2012.aspx

General info about IGBA at:  http://illinoisgba.com