Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab

We will be closed for Winter Break for several days!

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!

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

Welcome in the spring with us at our annual community BBQ. This next Sunday, May 4th, the lab will be hosting a celebration of volunteers, graduating students, new staff, grants and continued good times. We'll have an open grill with some meat and some kind of vegetarian option, but please feel free to bring your own dish. We'll kick the fire off around noon and continue on in to open hours.

Volunteers are highly encouraged to attend so that they can meet some of our new student staff helping us with workshops this summer!

IEEE students are putting on a Touch Synthesizer workshop this week:

6-8pm WED Apr 23 SIEBL 1105
3-5pm SAT Apr 26 DCL 1310

See the picture/flyer for more details.

Jeff, Virginia and Bob will be presenting a short workshop on some neat things you can do with Inkscape and associated tools at the main Fab Lab this next Sunday the 27th, from 3-4p. It's free and open to anyone and will be part of the training for our new staff. Just show up to join in, we will put any notes and tutorials online.

Come visit the Fab Lab this Thursday for our participation in the Boneyard Arts Festival! The lab will be open from noon to 10p to the community and have plenty of cool projects on exhibition. For more details on the event in general, which includes artists and venues of many kinds see the website: http://40north.org/programs/boneyard

Within 2 short hours Andrew Wesly and I got the Lulzbot TAZ 3D printer working! We're excited to add a 1 cubic foot build size printer to our repertoire - but first we have to master the mystic and perplexing ancient arts of gcode sorcery! We have yet to conquer such challenges in the past two years but with a recent victory over the Neuromaker the Shapeoko, Vision 3D, snapbot, MDX-20 and TAZ are soon to follow.

The Fab Lab is extending its open hours to time during the day! The new hours start April 1st:

• Sunday afternoon from 1 to 6 pm
• Monday afternoon from 12 to 6 pm
• Tuesday evening from 6 to 9 pm
• Thursday all day from 12 to 9 pm

Remember the Urbana Free Library also has an Open Lab for Teens (ages 11-18) that happens weekdays after school from 3-6p on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday most weeks. Check their calendar.

Go check out the annual exhibition of artwork from the metals department! Many of the featured projects made use of Fab Lab tools. The opening is on the 19th of April, and takes up much of the main floor at the Krannert Art Museum.

The Fab Lab has won a Lulzbot TAZ 3D printer! Yes, that's an update - we thought it was an older model but turns out it's going to be a 3D printer with a nearly cubic foot build frame! We hope to get it started at the main lab and then move it on over to The Urbana Free Library for Open Lab with teens!

Victor Ekpuk came to visit us the Fab Lab today! He cut out some original art on the laser. Go check out his main exhibit at Krannert Art Museum up through July 27th:

http://kam.illinois.edu/exhibitions/current/autographics.html

Just a reminder that the Fab Lab will have a booth out at Engineering Open House today, just outside of the Mechanical Engineering Lab on the Bardeen Quad. We'll be staffing it from 9a-3p both Friday and Saturday. The main lab will also be open on Saturday from 9a-2p for general visitors. Feel free to stop by and/or help help us staff the table! Thanks!

Learn how to make an Arduino robot:

https://www.facebook.com/events/482073611914451/?ref=3&ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular