Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab

We are open once again. I hope you had a good holliday break!

Our regular hours  are in effect and I hope to see you here

We will be closed for Winter Break for several days!

Another cool idea from Instructables--arduino clock, with personalized messages. 

Great for a personalized present....

http://www.instructables.com/id/Personalised-Word-Clock/

Possibly of interest, complete plans and instructions for " 3D Printed Quadcopter with Arduino" from Instructables.

It looks like this could be done pretty simply in the CUCFL.

Possibly of interest:  very cool robot programming methodology--use 3D printer  plus arduino to make hand held model.  Teach the model, then push to the real robot.

ROBOPuppet from Indiana U.  Really cool!

http://youtu.be/mcF0FTIEiG0

See the web site and conference paper for details.

Anna Eilering, Giulia Franchi and Kris Hauser, “ROBOPuppet: Low-Cost, 3D Printed Miniatures for Teleoperating Full-Size Robots,”  IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September 2014.

A cool project from Instructables:  the Hanster Wheel Desk

If I had one of these, I'd want to collect data on activity (pretty easy), and use it in apps.  E.g., to track activity, reinforce positive behaviors, and meter on-line activities (e.g., walk a mile to earn 30 minutes of minecraft....)

From Hong Kong, a "lace" dress, constructed with a "3D Pen".

This has got to be the hard way to make a dress, and I'd be surprised if it was especially comfortable to wear.  (Soon, we'll have the option to print much nicer materials, I'm sure.)

http://youtu.be/6NZMDRxCWVs

An interesting art work/gadget from Dominic Wilcox:  “GPS Shoes“.

These shoes can be programmed to give directions, and though scarcely ruby slippers, but they may be able to take you home.

Best of all, the feature is enabled by clicking your heals, a la Dorothy.  Cool!

By the way, Wilcox has a lot of other strange and interesting “inventions” in his portfolio.

Fab Lab Minecraft server is down until we negotiate a solution with the University Firewall or Comcast off-site. It can be connected to locally at the Fab Lab on port 5222. It will likely be fixed by the end of next week. Sorry for the trouble!

An awesome walk-in kaleidoscope!

From Kobe (I needed to translate the blog page), this is built as a giant origami, made of folded mirrors, inside a shipping container.  The folds are fabricated by laser cutting perforations into mirrors.

(I don't think the Epilog has sufficient power to replicate this, but I'm not sure.)

Google translate says "awesome" translates to: 素晴らしい

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-b-broadcom-pinout,27248.html

Yet more awesomeness out of UIUC Bioengineering.  Tiny Robots!  Powered by muscle tissue! 

Fabbers will be interested that the structures were made using 3D printing techniques, to print out "hydrogel".

See the paper for details.

Well done, all.

UI Press release

Publication:

C. Cvetkovic*, R. Raman*, V. Chan, B. J. Williams, M. Tolish, P. Bajaj, M. L. Sakar, H. H. Asada, M. T. A. Saif, R. Bashir, "Three-dimensionally printed biological machines powered by skeletal muscle" PNAS, 2014. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1401577111. - (download PDF)

A piece last week aggregated some recent art works that use 3D printing. These projects may be inspirational for Fabbers.

14 Ways 3D Printing Has Changed The Art World by Katherine Brook.