Teeny Hilbert Curve

Following on from the teeny text I wanted to see what kind of resolution I could get out of the laser. I chose the Hilbert curve as a nice little test pattern as it starts in one corner ends in another and has 1 single continuous line running across it. The first piece was straight off the drawing board and for whatever reason was 23mm wide. It cut perfectly except a slight blank patch at the start where the laser presumably was turning on

The second attempt was shrunk to 15mm wide and again is clearly well defined.

The final test piece was 10mm wide, each of the lines was cleanly etched into the material but the grain of the wood started to make it harder to see. I'm pretty impressed though and will be looking to do more things on a small scale shortly.

Large Lizards

I was commissioned through Etsy to make some Escher Lizards but 10cm in size. I managed to squeeze 27 onto a sheet and they came out pretty well. The larger size feels nicer in the hand. I even relisted them on Etsy. They can be done plain or with Mahogany or Oak wood stain or with a colour wash of any other colour.

27x lizards in one colour £20 + £3.50 worldwide shipping

Teeny Text

It's another LARP related cut of a group emblem on spruce wood dog tag stylee, which is why I haven't led with a whole item picture. Instead I wanted to show people the awesomeness that is the teeny tiny text of this item. I tried to etch the font because I thought that would produce a better image but it just wasn't readable, as a last ditch attempt I switched across to a low power cut, assuming that there would be insufficient step size to engrave such a small item. I was certainly wrong about that, the teeny tiny text here is testament to the awesomeness of laser cutting, I'll be looking to do more with this.

Dragon Tokens

Another group emblem for LARP, this time I tried to add an interesting Red/Black paint effect to the wood before it was cut. The red dried quite a bit darker but you can still see signs of the effect on the token, it's a bit more interesting than plain red.

Laser Cut Leather

I know leather can be laser cut, I've been asked to cut leather a good dozen times but the truth is that I don't have any leather and I don't know anything about leather which leaves me in a dubious position that I wouldn't know what to buy and how much to pay for it. So I finally found a compromise, somebody sent me some leather that they wanted cutting, I get the practice and the experience and I return the finished item no charge. And here are the results, I'm pleased and surprised how thick I could cut through, it's fairly stinky stuff though.

Veg plot labels

The veg plot in our garden has taken nearly a full year to get anywhere but I made a conscious effort this summer to fill it with soil and put some vegetables in it. Now we have rows of seeds and seedlings I wanted to identify each of the vegetables. Everything can be solved with a laser cutter so I made these labels up with a nice big font so that Eli can read them. The best thing is that they all came from scraps that I'd normally throw away.

Rune Tags

One of the nice things about empire was that groups tried to get some uniformity amongst themselves, our group had brown and mustard clothing on left and right, other groups had little trinkets like this to suggest they were all healers. It's hard to imagine that the next game is only 2 weeks away now, I'm hoping for another flood of orders again :)

Project #24 Mazing 2

I mentioned this briefly before but I tidied it up a lot in time for the maker faire and added a few features to it.

It's a CNC controlled marble in a maze, the X and the Y are belt driven rather than the more common tilt mechanism. The intent was to persuade people to type in a series of simple programming type commands to drive the ball around the maze from the start point to the end point. I'm pretty sure people didn't see it as programming which is probably a good thing as they were too busy having fun with it. I housed the electronics on top of the board so people could see the details, put in a compass and a scale and gaffa taped a hinge so that the whole thing could flip up and people could see the underneath. 

24 Projects/ 28 weeks

In essence it's a very simple XY control, but to add some programming aspect to it I set up the arduino to understand a very basic language sent over the serial port. 'N10,E10' would move the ball 10 units north, then 10 units east. I went with 10 units for 1 square because then you could also do movements smaller than 1 square. The distance requested was simply scaled by a factor for the number of steps required and then the code loops until the IO lines have been toggled the appropriate number of times.

For a project on such a short time scale you have to use what's at hand. The XY frame is from a 3020 laser cutter spares I had lying around after the laser cutter fire. The stepper motor drivers are big beefy Keling 4030s I had left over from my failed CNC milling machine and surely everyone must have an arduino or two kicking around by now. Magnets from the gauss gun kits and ball bearings from Donkey Kong. In fact the coding took significantly longer than the mechanical design and assembly.

Version 1 of the code featured a very simple parser of the incoming serial string, it only recognised N,S,E,W and only in capitals. After the first day of the maker faire I vowed to make some serious changes to the way it worked and an extra hour of coding on the Sunday morning made a world of difference. The final version of the code accepts upper or lower case, NE,SE,NW,SW for diagonal movements (although NE10, moves north 10 and east 10 which imo is simpler than calculating the hypotenuse and having to type NE14), and some limit checks which count the number of steps made in any direction and stop you from running it into walls. These step counts are also used to return the ball to the start at the end of every run meaning that you have to type a complete string of instructions to achieve the goal.

Even though it's nothing special I thought I'd share the source code too.

I figure this is the optimal route through the maze.

Project #23, Birds and Fish

After the maker faire I came back wanting to do some more escher tessellations. I realised I hadn't done any of the 2 shape tessellations, so now I present this mix of birds and fish to you.

Escher Birds and Fish, £9 + £3.50 worldwide P&P

23 Projects/ 27 Weeks

Iron Man 3 Arc Reactors

I probably should have done this weeks ago but I finally got round to creating a new arc reactor for Iron Man 3. It's available for sale from all the usual web page. Obviously it's laser cut detail in the front of a polymorph block, the same as the other arcs.

Project #22, Keep Rollin, Rollin.....

So even though DK isn't going to the maker faire and I have a million other things to be working on before the maker faire I just can't help but make a few more tweaks and changes to the machine. This week I managed to make all the ladders and girders for the new DK, I also redrew all the sprites (because the new style just needs pixel outlines rather than cuts) and I assembled them onto the back boards. I laser cut some perspex windows and heat bent them through 90 degrees to catch the balls as they drop, and (because this version is closer to the original game in terms of girder angles) I had to add an additional little slope section to ensure that the balls change direction quickly but also manage to roll all the way down to the bottom window. 

22 Projects/ 26 Weeks

Mazing

With the UK Maker Faire just days away I had to concede and cut my loses. Donkey Kong just wasn't going to be finished in time and to an acceptable standard, so I had to make the decision not to take it as a half built project to the Maker Faire. I still want to take something interactive though so I needed to make a new project.

The new project is a CNC controlled ball bearing rolling round a maze. The XY frame is taken from my old 3020 (the one that caught fire) and is driven by some hefty stepper drivers from my old CNC mill. A couple of magnets are placed on top of the machine and a ball bearing on top of a sheet of mdf. Sure it's only a flat maze but there is a reason for that, the whole thing is driven from an arduino and I'm going to let people program the arduino to drive it round the maze.

I wrote a small application that converts a command string sent via the serial port into a series of movements. N10, E20 etc. Simple enough to pick up quickly. Multiple commands can be strung together in one sentence so hopefully some people will be able to describe the maze well enough to get the ball from the start to the finish (and if not the fun is in the trying right?) I just need to mount the electronics on the end of the board and hook up some limit switches so that the frame can find it's own home position and then it will be ready for some video.

It's not quite as visually appealing as Donkey Kong, but I'm hoping that the people who use it will have just as much fun and it's certainly a lot more educational than DK.

Donkey Kong Boards

Just a quick update from the weekend. I had to recut the X rails 3 times so far to get to something that works well with the distance between the two vertical rails. From silly mistakes to design flaws I think I've finally got something that is close to working (close enough not to recut it for another week)

I added some back boards this time to make things a bit neater and better aligned. I'm now in the process of populating those boards with girders and ladders to make it look functional, then I'll probably work on the ball lift next so that I can at least have circulating barrels to show off if nothing else.

Project #21, Donkey Kong X Axis

The UK maker faire is fast approaching so I thought I better get started on the Donkey Kong remake. This week I mostly concentrated on redrawing everything (as I appear to have lost some original files) and getting some of the parts moving. This is the X axis that will support Mario and he moves from left to right. It's a very simple stepper motor and belt drive combo. I made custom brackets at either end for my parts and affixed them to some 8mm rods.

The test worked mostly well, I need to adjust the central idler wheel a little (second video) as everything pinches when I pull the belt tight (there is a reason for the middle wheel if anyone fancies a guess)

21 Projects/ 24 weeks.

Project #20, Table Decorations

The last piece of laser work I did for the wedding are the table decorations. Based on item no 300 of my 365 things project, this was a redesign and a revamp of the butterfly cage. The aim was to make them faster to cut and simpler to assemble, I achieved the later. The bottom is a separate piece and is only glued in once the butterflies are in place. I ended up making 6 cages, one for each table. If there is interest I'll happily release this as a kit.

20 projects/ 23 Weeks