It’s great to watch a project progressing, and Rebekah and Nathaniel (with help from Aaron and Nathan) have made a lot of progress on their Tetris coffee table project. Just a couple of days ago, Rebekah prototyped a grid system…
…and after a bunch of soldering and laser cutting and assembly, the full grid system took shape.
This evening, Aaron contributed some of his coding wizardry…
…and voilà!
Still lots of work to do, but great progress being made!
Round two of our laser engraved intaglio prototype completed!
In collaboration with Clarity (student), we decided to test the resolution of the process – how close can vector engraved lines be to one another? – so we based the prototype on some of the files I had developed for my kumiko-style cabinet panel, and the results are really encouraging!
The Dirty Lab – the largest project area in our space, with lots of movable work surfaces – is a great space for collective art. We’ve hosted sign making for the March for Science, and students, faculty, and visiting artists collaborated on a banner for International Workers Day. Today, students and faculty worked on signs for the National School Walkout and March 14, 2018.
Some old school techniques…
…and some new ones. We used the laser cutter to cut some 10 mil mylar – a new material for us that just arrived, and that will hopefully make our stencil activity for Making Social Change a little easier in the fall – creating an AR-15 stencil and accompanying “NO” symbol.
As people enter our space, we’re looking to find ways to communicate answers to the questions “Who belongs here?” and “What kinds of making are valued?” To the first question, we were influenced by some of the practices of Stanford University’s d.school. On our University Innovation Fellows trip last summer, we spent some quality time there, learning about and documenting the ways that physical space can be used to communicate and encourage various ideals and behaviors. The walls of the d.school are covered with photos of people who use the space.
We decided to borrow and adapt that idea, and purchased a little Instax Mini 9 camera…
…to begin to create our own version.
We take photos of visitors and users, and ask them to write their name and major on the bottom of the photo, just using a Sharpie. The goal is to fill up the mobile wall, top to bottom.
As a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary space, Making Across the Curriculum is an important part of our mission, and we hold as a cultural value an inclusive vision of making. In the center of our emerging “people wall” is a word cloud generated by Jennifer Kraemer (Early Childhood Education and maker educator champion), based on a student discussion during a “tinkering night” activity for her Constructive Math and Science in Early Childhood Education Class. The kinds of things represented – largely crafts and more “traditional” arts and activities – signal to people the range of making valued in the space, and offer something of a counterweight to the idea that making is only about 3D printers and laser cutters.
The space is always a work in progress, but we hope that through intentional signalling – putting our community loom front and center, for instance – we can continue to create a welcoming and inclusive environment.
In addition to being scientists, Max (Chemistry) and his brother John (who teaches Math) are also musicians, and they recently collaborated on designing and 3D printing a saxophone mouthpiece, using the Form 2 with tough resin. The results are promising.
Here’s John performing some sweet sax using the v1 mouthpiece.
The two are planning to experiment with different geometries and configurations, and based on their experience with the v1 prototype a) they’ll print future versions oriented reed side up so that any support structure scars end up on the less important face, and b) we need to get some dental resin, as the tough resin reportedly tastes terrible.
Max (Chemistry) recently completed an astronomy project, a laser-cut wall hanging display of the night sky. I had the chance to help with some early prototyping for the project, and we first set out to just get a sense of how light would interact with acrylic. We created a ruler of sorts, with different holes of known size…
…and took it into a dark room with a flashlight for testing…
Max used In-The-Sky.org Planetarium to generate a star map of the sky in a particular location on a particular date at a particular time, and then exported that map as an SVG file for post processing in Illustrator to generate the cut file needed by the laser. He cut the map out of opaque black acrylic, and we got back in the Clean Lab to try it out.
Beautiful.
Here’s the finished product, housed and ready to hang:
The sign says it all.
Vadim (one of FLC’s math professors) brought in a couple of broken toys, with the hope that someone in the makerspace would want to see if they could be fixed. We quickly cooked up a bounty program, with the reward being a custom Innovation Center t-shirt, to be designed by Rebekah (student and Innovation Center staff) and made using the vinyl cutter (one of the tools in the lab that gets the most use) and t-shirt press we have in the clean lab. Jordan (student) took up the challenge. Using a multimeter and soldering iron, he quickly diagnosed and solved the problem, bringing the car back to life.
Stoked to find simple ways for students to get involved in the space, solving real-world problems.
Diane Carlson (Sociology professor, and co-creator of Making Social Change) and I finally got around to building out version 2.0 of the Wheel of Voter Fortune Diane created as part of the Making Across the Curriculum faculty professional development academy from summer of 2016. Diane uses the wheel with her students to help them develop an understanding of voter suppression. Building upon Diane’s original prototype, we added a mask so that only one segment of the wheel would be revealed.
We also created a control panel to hold a switch and batteries…
…and used a piece of copper wire and an LED to create a flexible lamp.
Ideas for version 3 include interchangeable question wheels, and maybe some elaborate game show lights and sounds!
Rebekah Keely (student and Innovation Center staff) and Marc Olsen (Math) collaborated on a laser cut version of Napier’s Bones, a manual mathematical multiplication manipulative for Marc to use with his Math students.
It takes a minute to get the hang of it, but it’s a quick and hands-on way to do multiplication.
Rebekah has mad Illustrator skills, and designed and perfected the file. It’s up on Thingiverse, if you’d like to grab one and make it.
Marisa Sayago (Art), her student Clarity (late of our inaugural Making Social Change class) and I are prototyping a print making process using makerspace tools and techniques, with the goal of incorporating whatever we come up with – ideally intaglio using copper plates – into Marisa’s class this semester. I decided to do some experiments using the Carvey, as it’s a quick machine and almost unbelievably easy to learn, even for novices to both software and hardware. Unfortunately, early tests using engraving bits on copper were unsuccessful. Though copper is soft metal, the fine (and expensive!) engraving bits pretty quickly broke or wore down, even after many different adjustments to feed rate and pass depth, and though I love Easel (the browser-based software that runs the machine), it’s sometimes difficult to be as precise with it as a job like this requires, in terms of fixed line weights. Even doing the design work in Illustrator and importing *.svg files, I wasn’t quite able to get all of the variables to line up. All that said, I was able to confirm that a 1/16″ bit on linoleum works well for relief prints, so that’s another print making avenue to explore.
With the Carvey out of the running, we decided to see about the capabilities of the laser cutter, which offers the kind of line precision that seems to lend itself to intaglio. We set up a file in Illustrator to experiment with raster lines (pure RBG black: 0,0,0,) of varying weights (from .25 pt to 2 pt, in .25 pt increments) to see which produced the best results, and included our IC logo and Nova mascot as vector engraves (pure RGB blue: 0,0,255 with a line weight of .001 in Illustrator, hairline in CorelDRAW). Of course I realized after it was engraved that I had forgotten to mirror the line weight indicators, but isn’t that why we prototype in the first place?
Using a sheet of PETG – as a novel material in the lab we first had to research its suitability for use with a laser, and it turns out it is indeed suitable – we ran the engraving job, handing the piece off to Clarity to complete the inking and other parts of the process.
The result!
Turns out the vector engrave (which with a 2″ lens should produce a line of about .005″) works well, and the vector engrave at all sizes was too big to retain ink during the surface preparation step. This is actually a great learning, as a) vector engraves are super accurate, and b) they also take way less time than raster ones – throughput is an important consideration in any sort of lab activity that relies on makerspace machines. Now that we have narrowed down a general direction for the project, I’m going to work with Clarity to create a few more prototypes (testing things like line density) as we try to come up with a lab-ready process. Stay tuned!
Here’s a photo gallery of Clarity completing the inking and pressing over in the art lab:
