Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab

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.

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.

This was my first project with the Epilog Laser, and was a good way to get familiarized with Inkscape and the etching (raster) + cutting (vector) capabilities of the laser. This is a good first project for anybody!

The first step to this project is to find the dimensions of a standard lightswitch plate. I found all the information I needed at doorware.com - a supplier of all kinds of house-hardware including lightswitches, and had uncommonly helpful documentation on the exact dimensions of their lightswitches - 

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!