laser cutter – Page 2 – FLC Innovation

10Aug 2018

Puzzle Prototyping

Victoire (Communication and Media Studies) dropped by the lab today, and shared an idea she had about creating a puzzle as part of her Group Communications class in the fall. She brought with her a piece of paper with the “Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody” story on it, and talked about turning it into a puzzle. We quickly got to prototyping, first on paper, kicking around ideas about the sizes of the words, the individual pieces, and the puzzle overall. We fired up Illustrator to create version 1, which we laser cut on 1/8″ hobby plywood.

We immediately agreed that the pieces were too small, the words not legible enough. Back to the drawing board, where we more or less quadrupled the size of the pieces, and changed the letters from vector outlines to raster engraves.

This version felt more or less right, and then I remembered a project Jeremy (Making Social Change student) had done maybe a year ago, spray painting plywood and then laser engraving that for a white-on-black effect. We happened to have a piece of prepared plywood, which turned out to be the best of the bunch.

After test driving the puzzle, Victoire was satisfied with how it felt, and she was able to set up the laser job and produce enough puzzles to take with her for the first day of class in a couple of weeks.

Victoire walked in with an idea, and walked out with a v1 prototype about an hour and a half later, feeling super charged up and empowered. Priceless.

28Apr 2018

Further Adventures in Laser Intaglio

by Zack ⋅ Leave a Comment

Clarity (Making Social Change student and now Innovation Center employee) has continued to work on sharing the laser intaglio process with artists from the college’s printmaking course, here using Illustrator’s Image Trace functionality to achieve a sort of low-resolution abstraction of a photograph of a family pet.

This morning I stumbled upon (or perhaps became re-acquainted with? Clarity might in fact already be working on it, but it’s sometimes difficult to keep all of the ongoing projects straight) this DIY Printmaking Press project via @joshburker on Twitter. The files for the press can be downloaded from Thingiverse, and I can’t wait to get one of these tiny marvels printed and up and running in our space!

15Apr 2018

Surprises in the Makerspace

by Zack ⋅ Leave a Comment

The degree to which surprises – projects, artifacts, workshops – emerge in and from the community is the degree to which the community feels alive. Last week I walked in to find just such a surprise.

David Taylor, he of ion drive fame, decided to hold a workshop, and coordinated with Innovation Center staff (unbeknownst to me) to get flyers and pizza and materials together. Folks showed up and walked away with some pretty nice laser cut dice, and some skills besides.

It seems like a pretty simple formula: empower students, provide them with resources, stand back, and watch a vibrant, growing ecosystem emerge. Here’s to many more surprises.

24Mar 2018

Gotta Catch ‘Em All

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I’ve been thinking about ways to connect with our sister labs in the CCC Maker community. Inspired by Deborah and Salomon’s party favors from visits to the PCC space and related events…

…and by the excellent light created by the folks at Sierra College we received as a gift at the advisory board meeting…

…and by a project that we worked on with FLC faculty last semester, creating stickers for our Science Center hands-on workshop series…

The hexagon is a fascinating shape, and I’ve spent a lot of time with them for various kumiko-inspired project(s). It’s the shape I’d like to propose.

For the sticker project, we used a published hexagon laptop sticker standard, which states:

A hexagon sticker must be represented by a regular hexagon where the largest diagonals should measure 5.08 centimeters, and which must remain within 1 millimeter tolerance. The sticker must be oriented with a vertex positioned at the top.

I developed an Illustrator file of 24 hexagons – 1 for each college in the network – and worked up a prototype this morning.

One nice things about the size of the hexagons and the number of colleges in the network is that all of the chips (and a little frame besides) fit on a standard 12″x12″ piece of hobby plywood, a common material used with a laser.

I cut a second outline on another piece of wood to act as a back, and glued the whole thing up, placing a few Nova (our space bunny mascot) hexagons to visualize how it might look.

Here’s the PDF, which can be opened in Illustrator or Inkscape and tweaked to match the settings of your laser or whatever other machine you might want to use: cccmaker_hexgrid_v1

My dream would be that every makerspace in the CCC Maker network would have one of these on the wall, with chips from each of the participating colleges. Any material – wood, metal, clay (Payson – I’m looking at you) – and more or less 3mm thick. Who’s with me?

10Mar 2018

A Chemist Explores Astronomy

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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:

02Mar 2018

Laser Engraved Intaglio using PETG

by Zack ⋅ 1 Comment

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:

29Jan 2018

Safety Stencils

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After a few rounds of design and tweaking, I finished a prototype of stencils that mark the rally points for in the event of a building or campus evacuation. The principal design challenge for this project was the size – the sign needed to be larger than the bed of the laser – which necessitated designing in halves. The bottom stencil mask contains a cut out into which the rally point designator (North/South/East/West 1-5) can be dropped in. A fun collaboration with safety-minded staff.

11Dec 2017

Making and Advocacy in Action

by Zack ⋅ 1 Comment

Fired up by the sewing lab from a few weeks back, one of our Making Social Change groups ran with the quilt theme, creating an A-Z of Planned Parenthood quilt as their final group project. They used the laser cutter to cut various shapes and letters, and employed a variety of techniques, including embroidery and applique, to create their squares, and PVC pipe to assemble the frame. Here they are putting the finishing touches on their project.

On Thursday, December 7, representatives from Planned Parenthood tabled outside the Falcon’s Roost, and our students staffed the booth and displayed their quilt. They got a lot of foot traffic, answered a lot of questions, and distributed lots of literature, including some from built-in pockets on the quilt.

It’s great to see our students using their skills and passion to take a project from idea to application, and this project is a perfect example of exactly what we hoped would be the outcomes of this course when it was just some ideas on a whiteboard back in 2015.

10Dec 2017

Making Monuments

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The theme for week eight of Sociology 379: Making Social Change was “memory” and its role in social movements. We used timely news coverage of the controversy surrounding Confederate statues as a leaping off point for a discussion about monuments, using James W. Loewen’s “Ten Questions To Ask At A Historic Site” to frame the conversation.

We talked about a variety of examples, including EJI’s Community Remembrance Project, the Bussa Emancipation Statue, many from the San Antonio peaceCENTER’s gallery of Peace & Justice Monuments, and the relocation of Negro Hill Cemetery, an example from our very own backyard. We also spent some time on the aesthetics and the design of monuments, including the role of light and shadow, scale, and subject matter.

Students were then presented with a mock RFP:

The Carlson Dowell Social Justice Foundation is seeking proposals for a monument – a permanent public art piece – to be installed at Folsom Lake College in spring 2018. The monument will occupy a 50’x 85’ footprint adjacent to the Falcon’s Roost. Whether your goal is to memorialize or celebrate an important social justice issue, your proposed monument must also educate, in keeping with the college’s mission. The installation must also be interactive, encouraging students and the public to actively participate and interact with the work.

Specifications for the prototype included that it be free-standing, crafted at 1:24 scale, include at least one digital fabrication element – an object created/modified using the laser cutter, CNC, vinyl cutter, or 3D printer – and that it incorporate LED lighting.

We took a walk out to the proposed monument site so that students would have a sense of the scale and surroundings. Back in the lab, students set to work on their proposals. In a very short time – about 2 hours, really – groups were able to craft some really thoughtful proposals and interesting prototypes.

David, Clarity, and Luna developed their proposal around the idea of differences and commonalities among Folsom Lake College students. Their prototype was based on a maze concept, with many paths leading to a central common ground.

Another group developed their proposal around issues of food distribution and food insecurity. They incorporated a greenhouse into their prototype, using www.makercase.com to generate the cut file, and the laser to cut the parts from clear acrylic. Here Nusaybah and Micaela are preparing to solvent weld the pieces together.

Zainub, Heather, Jeremy, and Kila based their design on a View-Master Viewer, and were able to modify a Custom View-Master Disc they found on Thingiverse (CC BY TheHeadlessSourceMan), which they cut from wood using the laser.

As the final step in the process, groups shared their proposals and prototypes and took questions from their peers.

We’ve got a great group of students, and I’m continually impressed by their open, collaborative, and creative approach to the course.

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Tag Archives: Laser Cutter

Puzzle Prototyping

Further Adventures in Laser Intaglio

Surprises in the Makerspace

Gotta Catch ‘Em All

A Chemist Explores Astronomy

Laser Engraved Intaglio using PETG

Safety Stencils

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