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Fire the Laser!

I finally got some quality time with the Laser Cutter at Milwaukee Makerspace, and I have to say, I’m fairly pleased with the results!

Milwaukee Makerspace Logo

I started with the Milwaukee Makerspace logo (in SVG format) in Inkscape, and exported it as a DXF file. (I also kept the stroke of the width just 1 pixel for all the lines.)

Once I had a DXF file, I was able to import that into CorelDRAW, which is what the PC that controls the Laser Cutter uses to do the work. There’s a bit of trickery in CorelDRAW between raster and vector artwork, but doing it this way with a DXF file at just one pixel wide seemed to force it to work in vector mode, which is what I wanted.

Laser Etched Wood

Knowing the power and speed settings for the Laser Cutter are tricky, and require a bit of experimentation based on if you are etching or cutting, and how deep you wish to etch or cut. The nice thing is, as long as you don’t move whatever your material is, you can run the Laser Cutter multiple times to go deeper, or complete a cut. In many cases this may be the way to go… (More on that later!)

It’s worth noting that some materials should NEVER be cut. Since our pals at PumpingStation: One already have a list, I’ll point you to the NEVER CUT THESE MATERIALS list on their their wiki. The also have this cool list of laser settings. (Yeah, we’re working on that as well. We have a different laser, so we need to start from scratch.)

Laser Etched Wood

Here’s a close-up of the etching into wood. I ran it a few times. If you’re doing a vector cut, it just traces around the outline, and goes super-fast. If you are using raster artwork, it’ll behave like an old dot-matrix printer and go line-by-line and take forever. Shane did this Periodic Table and it took almost two hours. (It does look pretty amazing though!) I’m still not 100% sure what CorelDRAW does with each format. I tried to import an SVG file but it seems to convert it to raster format. The DXF kept its vector format, so I’ll stick with that for now.

Laser Etched Plastic

After I was satisfied with wood, I moved on to plastic. When I say plastic, I mean “plastic” and I don’t know if it’s acrylic, or plastic, or what kind of plastic, or anything else, so I’ll just leave it at that for now. (And yes, we’ve got a nice scrap pile of plastic at the Makerspace to experiment with.)


Laser Etched Plastic

This is just an outline of the logo, but we should be able to use a filled-in logo (in raster format) and create the effect of frosted glass, and then we can do this Floating Glow Display project from Make with our laser-etched plastic. Hmmm, it looks like I just gave myself another project to tackle!

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Pachube Learning

Pachube I first heard of Pachube shortly after it launched, and took a look at it, but didn’t really have any data to feed it. Then they started charging for the service, so I never pursued it, and then they got acquired by LogMeIn, and became free again, so I figured I’d check it out.

If you’ve seem my posts about logging the temperature and humidity, then you can guess what data I started feeding into Pachube.

Take a look at the feed Environment for a constantly-updated view of my office. We’re tracking the temperature and the humidity, but I’d also like to add a photocell (light sensor) and occupancy sensor (PIR) at some point.

I dabbled in Processing code, but ended up going back to Perl after some instability. There’s still some issues with bad data I need to sort out. (See below.)

Bad Data

There’s not a lot of amazing code in place yet, as it’s all learn-as-I-go experimental, but that’s fine with me…

Pachube iPhone

I mean, as it stands right now, I can quickly see the status of my office from anywhere in the world as long as I’ve got a mobile phone and an Internet connection. That alone should be worth something…

I’ve been adding updates along the way over at the project page on the Milwaukee Makerspace wiki. I’m sure I’ll have more blog posts on this, but smaller updates will probably just show up on the wiki.

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Holiday Make-A-Thon 2011 ReCap

I had a fun time at the Holiday Make-A-Thon and everyone else there seemed to as well…

There was painting, and decorating, and soldering, and knitting, and 3D printing, and gourds, and ABS, and PCBs, and yearn, and glue, and even some glitter!

Big thanks to the Milwaukee Makerspace guys for teaching people to solder, and for helping me out with the wooden ornaments. More thanks to Bucketworks for hosting the event. Based on the feedback we got, I’m going to assume we’ll do it again next year.

Here’s a few snapshots I got during the event.

Ornaments

Some of the wooden ornaments painted and glittered up. (Thanks to Brant from Milwaukee Makerspace for the googly eyes.)

Penguin

I’m not 100% sure but I think this dried gourd penguin was made by Amanda from Milwaukee Makerspace. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.) My kids told me it was the most awesome gourd they saw all day.

Reindeer

These reindeer from Brant are extra-cool because they were made from the scraps of the first test of my cucoloris design. They were sitting around the space near the CNC Router and he found a neat way to upcycle them.

Starclops

I may be biased, but Starclops, which was created by hot-gluing a star ornament onto a snowman ornament, adding a googly eye, and using a soldering iron to brand it, may be the best thing I made that day.

And finally, thanks to all the folks who showed up. Rather than battling the crowds at the malls you opted to join us and make something with your own hands… and that’s pretty cool. We need more of that in this world. :)

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Upcycle Plastic Repair

A year ago I saw a post on the Sector67 site that talked about upcycling the plastic from laundry jugs. After seeing the post I thought about how many of these jugs we end up tossing in the recycling bin, and if there were any ways I could make good use of them.

Laundry Jug
Empty Laundry Jug

Here’s a typical laundry jug, and as you can see I cut out a nice (mostly) flat piece from the side.

Plastic
Cutting the plastic with an X-ACTO blade

I wanted to cut a small piece into a rectangle to match a missing piece from a window blind, and using an X-ACTO knife and steel ruler are the perfect choice for such things.

(Somehow we’ve lost/misplaced these window blind parts, or they weren’t here when we moved in. I thought briefly about 3D printing a replacement, but cutting a piece from plastic I’ve already got seemed like a better option.)

Holder
New vs. Original

My replacement is not an exact match, but I’ve cut it a bit taller to provide some friction so it will stay in place. For the simple purpose it will serve, it should do just fine.

Holder in Place
Original and New

Here’s the original piece, and my replacement piece. Both are holding the blinds into the bracket reasonably well.

I’ll often just cut out the flat sides of laundry jugs and keep them in a stack and then recycle the rest of the jug. They’re handy to have around when you need one.

We’ve talked about building an injection molding machine at Milwaukee Makerspace (Mold-o-rama anyone?) so if that happens, I may have a few more uses for these plastic jugs.

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Sleep Study

Sleep Study

Well, I finally did it. After years decades of not sleeping well, and snoring away the time I do spend sleeping, I did a sleep study. I’ve been wanting to do it for a few years, but you either need insurance or money to do one, and in the past, I’ve had neither…

Yeah, I’ve got sleep apnea. If you don’t know what that is, it basically means you stop breathing while you are sleeping. You don’t have to be a medical doctor to know that’s probably a bad thing. In fact, it’s believed that sleep apnea may have contributed to Reggie White’s death.

I’ve got friends with sleep apnea who got tested, and ended up with CPAP machines. One told me it changed his life, and urged me to get tested. (Hey Les, I finally did it!)

The test itself was a lot of fun for a nerd like me. They connected 27 sensors to my body to capture data. This included 15 on the head, one on each ankle, some on the chest, back, and stomach to monitor breathing, and a pulse sensor on the finger. (Interestingly enough, I’ll be getting my own pulse sensor very soon.)

They wire you up and let you sleep a few hours to monitor things, and then (if needed) put a CPAP mask on you, and it helps you breathe. It was a little weird, but I’m sure I’ll get used to the mask, especially if it means better sleep and better health. (The machines are also much quieter than they used to be.)

I was also told that surgery can be an option rather than a CPAP machine, but they do not recommend it, and it doesn’t always work. I’m cool with the technology instead.

I did do a little probing about the data that got collected from the study. I asked it if was just numerical data from the sensors, perhaps in a CSV file. The technician said that was “basically” correct. (It was hard to gauge how technical the technician was.) I asked about getting a copy of my data. They told me I’d need to ask the doctor, as it was for him. I personally think it should be available to me. I’m the patient, right? Isn’t the data about me? Shouldn’t they be required to share it with me?

Anyway, I was told that I slept good with the mask on. I didn’t feel like I did, but I think “medically” I probably slept good. I should find out in a few weeks when I get my own machine for home use. (The mask probably wasn’t optimal either, as they spend some of the time adjusting the pressure and monitoring the sensor data. Hopefully they’ve got it all dialed in at the end.)

Oh, I was also told that the home machine logs data and the doctor takes a look at that data as well. Anyone know how to get that data from the machine? :)