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Two Square Feet of Art

M

Our story of the M begins when my friend Tiffany from While You Were Out Pet Sitting Service mentioned she was doing a charity event called Red, White & Black: 100 Square Feet of Art. If you remember the old “250 Square Feet of Art” event the Eisner used to hold (and I took part in) it’s like that. Artists create 12″x12″ boards, and they get auctioned off. So I volunteered.

I started with this letter M, in the typeface Umbra BT. I liked the 3D quality of it, and since I also love using the laser cutter at Milwaukee Makerspace, I had a plan.

M

The Photoshop mock-up was just an idea, so I re-created the letter M in Inkscape to prepare it to be laser cut. You’ll notice right now that the M in the first image and second image don’t match exactly. (I wish I had noticed at the time!)

I cut the shapes out of 1/8″ Baltic Birch plywood. My plan was to cut one board like this, and I’d the use the pieces to attach to another board, and the template piece as an assembly guide. Good idea, right? Right.

M

My next thought was, “Why waste full boards to get more pieces?” and I arranged the pieces to minimize waste. This works well for general assembly of things, but for art, maybe not so much. The pieces cut fine, but I did have to deal with kerfs, some scorching, the grain of the wood, etc. None of those things were huge deals, but they’re things to be aware of in the future.

M

At this point it was just a matter of assembly. A bit of glue, and bit of wood stain, what could go wrong?

M

There was a lot of time spent with the glue and the clamps. Well, most of the time was spent waiting for glue to dry. I obviously need another 20 spring clamps. Just for fun, this is about the time I got sick and had a work overload, so I started getting really concerned about completing this on time. (It gets worse.)

M

Here it is done! I call it “M1” by the way. An “M” for “Milwaukee” or “Mike” or “Mary” or whatever you like… or you could flip it over and make it a “W” for “Wisconsin”, etc.

I also had a nightmare time with the wood stain, though I managed to recover that by changing the piece. I learned everything I’d forgotten about staining wood in the 20 years since I’ve last done it.

M

Here’s a side view of M1 showing the dimensionality of the piece. The M is about 3/8″ thick.

M

But wait, what’s that? I still have that leftover piece that I used as an assembly template! Hmmm…

M

Yeah, here’s “M2” as it were. I figured that a perfectly nice piece of laser cut wood should not go to waste, so I came up with another idea. I reversed the color scheme of the stains on the two pieces of wood, attached the front piece to a back piece, and blammo! Another wonderful(?) piece of laser cut art.

M

I think I may actually like M2 better than M1, maybe just because of the process that created it, but hey, you be the judge, or the critic, or the bidder, or whatever. Cheers!

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Snowflakey

Kimotion Arts

Tennis Man

Here’s a thing I’m calling (for lack of a better name) “Snowflakey”. The idea came from the Kimotion Arts store on Shapeways.

Kimotion Arts

Kimotion Arts has these neat 3D printed ornaments with an object arranged in a circle to make a snowflake-like thing. I dig it, so I decided to dig into it.

Bad Man

The first thing I did was fire up Inkscape and draw a really simple figure. It’s terrible, really, but I did it in less time than it took Inkscape to launch on Mac OS X. I created an SVG file, and then exported it as a DXF file, making sure I converted all the line segments into straight lines first. (Of course there were no curves in this drawing, but if there were, I’d convert them!)

Bad Man Flake

Once I had my DXF file, it was easy to pull that into OpenSCAD, and place six of them in a circle with the following code. 


objheight = 4;
objcenterspacing = 20;
objrotate = -70;

for (i = [0:5]) {
  rotate(i*360/6, [0,0,1])
    translate([0, objcenterspacing, 0])
      rotate([0, 0, objrotate]) 
        linear_extrude(height = objheight, center = true) 
          import( "figure.dxf" );
}

The code is not the greatest… in fact there is probably much room for improvement, but it’s the first thing I got working, so I ran with it. My idea for the 3 variables at the top were so you could easily tweak them for different art. Sadly, as you change objcenterspacing and objrotate, they affect each other, so it’s a lot of back and forth between those two values. I also could not find a way to assign a filename to a variable, so your DXF will need to be named “figure.dxf” or you’ll need to edit the import line.

Tennis Man

Since my drawing was so terrible I wanted to try something else, so what better than Land recreation symbols 27, better known as “Tennis Man” by most people.

Tennis Man Flake

A few quick edits and I had this nice Tennis Man Snowflake for that special ball smasher on your list… (Notice the canvas size of 25mm wide by 35mm high. You can do what you want, but the OpenSCAD code will be expecting something close to that. Otherwise you’ll just have to tweak the numbers even more.)

Blobby Man Flake

I decided to try once again to draw something. This one took a little longer than a minute, but turned out just as terrible as the first one I did. Still, maybe you like “Blobby Man” as a snowflake.

Ant Flake

How about ants? This one is interesting. Maybe spiders would have been a better choice. (And yes, I know I could probably do the entire “6 items rotated” thing right in Inkscape, but that wasn’t the goal here.)

Horse Flake

What about the old nag? No, I’m not taking about your mother-in-law (kidding!) but this fine old horse from OpenClipArt.org, where I get many of the SVG files I use. Export this as an STL file and you’re ready to print it on your RepRap!

If you’ve got an improvement to this OpenSCAD code, by all means, let me know. I’m still very much in the learning phase with OpenSCAD, so I do these things to learn, and because of that I’m open to any suggestions.

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Holiday Make-A-Thon 2012 [Time Lapse]

Hack Friday

Here’s a quick time-lapse video from the 2012 Holiday Make-A-Thon that Milwaukee Makerspace does in cooperation with Bucketworks. We’ve been doing it for 3 years now, and Bucketworks has been doing it on their own even longer.

It seems like a lot more hackerspaces are doing these type of events this year, which is awesome, and there’s even a nice name for it now: Hack Friday. In my mind, part of belonging to a makerspace/hackerspace is the love of creating things, sharing that with others, especially on a day that has become completely over the top in regards to consumerism. Our mission is plain and simple: Instead of buying useless crap on “Black Friday” join us and we’ll help you make something for the holidays.

I figured it was also a good time to test out the time lapse capabilities of the GoPro Hero3. I have a workflow in place that includes taking still images with the intervalometer and then combining the frames into a video, and then resizing and cropping the video to the correct proportions. It seems to work. Oh, and the camera motion near the end is actually the gaff tape giving out before the camera fell face-down. Enjoy!

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Mothership Hacker Moms

Mothership Hacker Moms

I fully support Mothership HackerMoms (The first women’s hackerspace) and was happy to donate to their Kickstarter campaign. Their goal was/is to construct a workshop with tools and equipment, and create a kids program and business incubator for moms. I think it’s a great idea.

So who would be against this? Nobody, right? Well, actually, some people spoke out… see Anti-HackerMoms send hate mail, HackerMoms respond. Great responses from the women involved. Mothers are important to the world, and having a space where they can get their making fix should be viewed as a good thing. Here’s another blurb:

We are a new kind of playground and workspace for creative mothers. Fun to us is not mani-pedis, but making, breaking, learning and hacking our bright ideas. HackerMoms model active creative lives for our kids who learn, explore and create as mini-makers alongside us. We offer members daily childcare. We also welcome dads.

I don’t think they have any plan to be exclusionary, and they certainly aren’t out to stop anyone else from doing their own thing. You want to start a hackerspace geared towards women who have chosen not to have kids, or for single dads, or for people who view their pets as their babies? Go for it. I’m sure they won’t try to stop you.

And here’s the thing… we all have/had mothers. (Well, unless you were created in some other way, I know some people were.) Imagine being a kid and having your mom take you to a hackerspace, and growing up in that sort of community and culture. I can’t wait to see what the kids who frequent the Mothership HackerMoms space turn out like in 10 or 20 years.

If you believe in creative spaces like these, support them, and let others know how awesome it is.

One more thing… over at Milwaukee Makerspace we’ve talked about how to reach out to more people, men, women, robots, etc. We’re interested mainly in maker, and less about gender, but you can bet that if a bunch of women (or mothers, or men, or cats) came to us asking for advice on how to start their own space, we’d help them out. In fact, we’ve already done that a bit for Spring City Launchpad. We’re also hoping that our new space will be much more inviting to all kinds of people. I guess we’ll find out how that goes in 2013!

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I heard you like cameras…

GoPro Mount

Yo dawg, I heard you like cameras, so I put a camera on your camera so you can take pictures of taking pictures…

Occasionally 3D printing is accused of being useless, or worse, silly. Well this is anything but silly, and it’s certainly not useless.

GoPro Mount

By combining the hot shoe mount I recently printed along with this Female GoProHD Mount we’ve got the camera-on-a-camera thing down like nobody’s business.

GoPro Mount

So yeah, camera on camera action, courtesy of 3D printing. Yeehaw.

But seriously folks, one of the great things about open 3D printing is that combos and mashups are quite common, and since we’ve first jammed a piece of chocolate into a hunk of peanut butter, sometimes things just go better together.