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

The Fablab now has a 3D pen. It's good at making tangles of ABS in mid-air! Come try it out and see if you can show-up our first efforts!

CUDO, the Champaign Urbana Design Organization, hosted a board game creation competition called CUDO Plays. The competition started back in Sept. of 2013 and just ended on Feburary 16th 2014. Several teams joined, and over the course of the six month span there were a number of events held with the intent of encouraging constant progress on the creation of new games from the Champaign Urbana community. 

Of course the Community Fab Lab opened our doors to be as useful as possible to the competitors. Here's a few examples of what they made...

The Saturday Morning Kid's Science Club tried their hand at laser carving a pumpkin. 

Turns out it takes a lot to carve a pumpkin with a laser, but the results might be worth the effort. 

Bob thought that Kat's T-Rex was pretty cool looking, so he went and made a skeletal Pterosaur.

This is the beta version and Bob says that the final version will be much better with stain or finish.

We probably should have said something BEFORE it happened, but... The CUC Fab Lab was one of the presenters at the 7th Champaign-Urbana PechaKucha meeting.

What Is PechaKucha you ask? It is an open mic style speaking event where all the presenters are allowed 20 slides to show and only 20 seconds to talk about each slide. This means that all the speakers get only 6 minutes and 40 seconds to talk about their topics. Most topics are about design, but they can vary widely; one guy talked about cooking hamburgers, another talked about a cross country bike event that raises money for cancer research. Our own Lauren Semeraro was the speaker, and did a lovely job of showing off the CUCfablab and the things we can do here. I hope that we got our message out to creative people who can put the space to work.

We had two people show up for the "Rock my Ride" summer class. All and all, I think they were quite pleased with the end results with their bikes. One placed green flames down the side of the bike and glow in the dark tubing along his handle bars. The other guy cut out two "superman shield" inspired designs that were attached to the bike.

Hopefully in the future we'll have more events like this and have a few more people show up to them.

One of the newer people showing up here at the Fablab is Steve Holt. He had a great idea of what to make with laser etching. Steve had found pictures of a Buick and its chassis and wanted them on a mirror.

The other day I  found an object on Thingiverse that I wanted to make because it's close to Christmas. THE Christmas Tree Christmas Tree Ornament!

The design can be found here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:170