Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab

This is a nice collection of articles about cool stuff you can do with a laser cutter:
Ten Best Articles on Laser Cutting of 2010
Ponoko appears to be a mail-order digital fabrican service.

Hat tip to Betty Barrett.

Monday, January 3 at 6:00pm, in the Fab Lab meeting area. Meeting to finalize Urbana Arts Grant application.

The CUCFL "Friends" held the first general meeting on Dec. 16, 2010.

The next meeting will be 20 Jan 2011 (tentative).

Please find attached notes from the Dec. meeting.

-- REMcG, acting chair

Full post and discussion here:
http://www.fabhub.net/showthread.php?56-quot-Friends-quot-Committee-Note...

We've created a new Facebook Page for the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Champaign-Urbana-Community-Fab-Lab/177273545636056
In addition to actually using the page, links to posts on the Fab Lab website are automatically posted to this page's wall.

We've also added a "Share" button to our website that will allow website users to easily link to content using dozens of social networking services.

Lastly, since I post on cucfablab.org far more often than I post on Facebook, I've set up my Facebook account to automatically share items that I post in "Luke Scharf's Blog".  If anyone wants to see how to set this up, let me know and I'll either show you how to do it or post a writeup.

Goal:
Create a cheesecake platter and trophy for a series of cheesecake competitions related to the Fab Lab.

The Business/Operations committee writes:

Fab Lab Open Session Hours, beginning Monday 12/20/2010:

• 2010 
  • 12/20 Monday 6-9 
  • 12/23 Thursday 6-9 
  • 12/26 Sunday CLOSED 
  • 12/27 Monday 6-9 
  • 12/30 Thursday 6-9 
• 2011 
  • 01/02 Sunday CLOSED 
  • 01/03 Monday 4-9 RESUME NORMAL HOURS 

We are expanding the hours of the Fab Lab on Mondays and Thursdays, on a trial basis.  The Fab Lab open session hours are now as follows:

• Sunday afternoon from 3 to 6 pm
• Monday evening from 4 to 9 pm
• Thursday evening from 4 to 9 pm

NOTICE

A DISCUSSION ON FAB ACADEMY HOSTING & PARTICIPATION FOR SPRING 2011 AT CHAMPAIGN-URBANA COMMUNITY FAB LAB WILL BE HELD ON THURSDAY DECEMBER 2 @ 5:30 PM

THE PROGRAM:
http://academy.cba.mit.edu/about/index.html

A Fab Academy prep video (Fab Lab videoconference at mcu.cba.mit.edu) is set for 9:00 am Boston time over the polycom next week on Tue Dec 7 - attend if you can!

RSVP 

There doesn't seem to be documentation on how to use the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms video conferencing system from non-Windows computers, so here's my take. I recommend recommended connecting to the CBA video conferencing server from Ubuntu Linux as follows:

There doesn't seem to be documentation on how to use the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms video conferencing system from non-Windows computers, so here's my take. I recommend recommended connecting to the CBA video conferencing server from Mac OS X as follows:

The Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab will be closed on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday November 25th. The Fab Lab will be open on Monday November 22nd, and Sunday November 28th.

From the article:

Community members came together Thursday afternoon for the grand opening of the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab, which aims to inspire innovative thinking in the general population.

The lab, which has been open to the public since April, is part of a global network of Fab Labs, which give community members the opportunity to have access to equipment and materials to design and build almost anything they can imagine or want.

The local Fab Lab is a joint effort by the University, Parkland College, the Don Moyer Boys and Girls Club and several other community organizations.

Neil Gershenfeld, director of The Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed the first Fab Lab at MIT.

In conjunction with the opening event, Gershenfeld spoke about the role of Fab Labs in empowering ordinary people to create technology.

Read more: Local Fab Lab gives tools to innovation to Champaign-Urbana

From the article:

URBANA – Call it a community workshop.

Metalworker Dean Rose came to create templates for making bells. University of Illinois freshmen came to put together a 3-D printer. A young mother came to design items for small kids. And youngsters from the Don Moyer Boys and Girls Club came to assemble tin-can robots.

All those projects and more were done at the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab, which opened earlier this year at 1301 S. Goodwin Ave., U – in a building just south of the UI's College of ACES Library.

Read more:  'Fab Lab' drawing variety of users

From the article:

The Champaign-Urbana Community FabLab will formally open on Thursday, November 11, at 3-5 pm in the FabLab, located in the Art Annex 2, 1301 South Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, 61801.

This event is open to everyone and will feature hands on activities, welcoming remarks by members of the Lab's Community Leadership Council, and by Neil Gershenfeld, Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms and the founder of the global FabLab network. The mission of the Champaign-Urbana Community FabLab is to promote ingenuity, invention and inspiration by introducing students of any age to modern prototyping and fabrication equipment. Our goal is to encourage creativity as well as an interest in architecture, art, computing, engineering, mathematics, science, and technical trades. Community access, at a reasonable cost, builds local capability with global links to the entire FabLab network — enabling personal growth, economic development and cross-cultural understanding. We encourage people to build virtually anything they can imagine.

Read more: Designmatters4 and FabLab are almost off and running

LOCAL FAB LAB BRINGS NEW CAPABILITIES TO COMMUNITY

The Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab brings digital design and fabrication equipment to the campus community. Located on the campus of the University of Illinois, the Fab Lab is partnering with local schools, the Don Moyer Boys and Girls Club, Parkland College and many others so that people of all ages can learn to use rapid prototyping equipment.

The formal opening ceremonies will be held on Thursday, Nov. 11 from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. in the lab, located at Art Annex 2, 1301 S. Goodwin Ave., Urbana, Ill.

The event will feature hands-on activities, a welcome by members of the Lab's Community Leadership Council, and remarks by Neil Gershenfeld, Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and Founder of the Global Fab Lab movement.

Also, Neil Gershenfeld will deliver the DesignMatters lecture "Programming Bits and Atoms: How To Make (almost) Anything" from 6:15 to 8:00 in the Lawrence Plym Auditorium, Room 134, Temple Hoyne Buel Hall (Art and Architecture Building).

Both events are free and open to the public.