Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab

The Fab Lab presented today at the 2013 University of Illinois Public Engagement Symposium. Thanks to Gary and MK Watson, Virginia McCreary, Andrew Knight and Jeff Ginger for showing the public some of our tools (live UP3D + Silhouette!), curriculum and collaborations. Additional thanks to everyone who stopped by to make something!

We would also like to extend our gratitude to the Office of Public Engagement for providing the grant that enabled the community Fab Lab installations at Stratton Elementary, Urbana Free Library and Tap In Leadership Academy.

Just a friendly reminder that the Fab Lab has 6 sewing and knitting machines of various sorts as well as unusual fabrics, like conductive and heat-reactive material. Come over and make good use of them in their new exapandable location in the break room.

We could use more patron-created art up on our walls. Anyone who provides us with some sizable art (or even interactive creations!) to put up will not only get mad props but also 5$ worth of material or laser time, courtesy of Jeff Ginger.

Photo credit to Gemma Petrie.

Have you ever just wished you could lift your pen off the paper and see your drawing become a real three dimensional object? The folks at WobbleWorks have created a 3D printer pen to do just this. Check it out:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1351910088/3doodler-the-worlds-first-3d-printing-pen

Ever since we got our new UP! 3D printer our old Makerbot 3D printer has been sitting on a shelf collecting dust. We benched it because we never got it to print successfully for more than 20-30 minutes at a time and never could figure out what the problem really was with the extruder.

If you're feeling adventurous come in and see if you can fix it! We'll give you unlimtied time with it (during open hours) and as much ABS plastic as you need for it. Should you manage to fix it we'll figure out some kind of prize.

I've updated several modules and the core files of the Drupal install. The good news is that this should cut down on the spam messages we've been all suffering. The bad news is that this may have set your user navigation links back to their defaults.

As if 3D printers weren't mind-blowing enough, iRobot (yes, the company responsible for the Roomba) has just filed a patent for a robot-assisted all-in-one fabricator that can print, mill, drill, and finish a final product — and all without human intervention. Read more about it at io9.

Thanks to Dean Rose we are now able to scan people and objects in 3D! We'll be working on this more in the coming weeks.

See more pictures on Flickr.

I'm enrolled in a coursera class on HCI to help expand my resources for teaching and found this video on rapid prototyping and the design process that I thought was quite relevant to our lab:

https://uofi.box.com/PowerOfPrototyping

From Steve Holt initially

Neat story of a small company start-up based on laser cutters making “Pibow”, a case for a small computer.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2098

A new woodworking shop is opening up over by Parkland. Some might be interested:

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/miscellaneous/2012-09-04/woodworking-school-open-champaign.html

Betty, Andrew and I visited Blackline Supply this past week, a locally owned art and architecture materials shop on campus. They have all kinds of construction materials, but what was most notable to me, was their affordable and high quality wood. I believe a 3x24 inch sheet was around 3$, which means a full sheet to fill our laser bed would be about 12$. They're pretty close by, located in the basement of the McKinley Foundation on campus - go pay them a visit!

I had the pleasure of presenting twice this past week at the Fab8nz conference via video conference. Among many things we discussed research in Fab Labs related to literacy, learning and empowerment as well as the Powers of 10 concept and how we've gone about doing mini FabLab deployments. If you're interested the paper and one of the presentations is available for download below!

An interesting series of suggestions:

http://blog.makezine.com/2012/06/27/tips-for-building-with-kids/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+makezineonline+%28MAKE%29

This upcoming Thursday (the 7th) we're having an informal meeting about updating the fab lab website. We will soon be changing the design and some of the information architecture, and want to make sure everyone has a chance to give input. Find us around 7p in the lab to join. Alternatively you can email Jeff Ginger (ginger@illinois.edu) with your thoughts.

The following Thursday (the 14th, also at 7p) we will then have a formal operations committee meeting to formally approve the new site.

Thanks!