Project #26 Engagement Ring Box

In reverse order now, I actually made a prototype for the large wooden box that in many ways is much more successful. This box still has a living hinge holding the lid on and the smaller scale of the item made it much easier to assemble. I flipped the box over and put an engagement ring it because I thought it was just the right size for the job. It's essentially a square box inside a rounded box but that gives quite a nice wall thickness to the box and a certain sense of style. The front and back sections connect with a big 'jigsaw' joint, slightly overkill for the small box but essential on the larger one. The lid is held shut with 3mm x 9mm diameter neodymiums they're strong enough to pull through the wood. It could easily be engraved, or inlaid or a million other things to smarten it up a bit which is why I'm sharing the files with you guys, let me know what you do with it. (svg here)

26 Projects / 30 Weeks

 

 

Project #25 Large Wooden Box

For LARP we required a large container with an 8"x 8"x 8" maximum volume, preferably with some engravings on the outside. I went all out for this one, designing a box using living hinges and having a nice amount of wall thickness. Ultimately I made a few silly mistakes and had to bodge a real hinge into the back for opening the lid but it's a really nice box and I hope that someone commissions a similar box so that I can make the tweaks and perfect the design.

The prototype however is a really nice box which had it's tweaks so I'll post that up shortly.

25 Projects/  30 Weeks

Teeny Hilbert Curve

Following on from the teeny text I wanted to see what kind of resolution I could get out of the laser. I chose the Hilbert curve as a nice little test pattern as it starts in one corner ends in another and has 1 single continuous line running across it. The first piece was straight off the drawing board and for whatever reason was 23mm wide. It cut perfectly except a slight blank patch at the start where the laser presumably was turning on

The second attempt was shrunk to 15mm wide and again is clearly well defined.

The final test piece was 10mm wide, each of the lines was cleanly etched into the material but the grain of the wood started to make it harder to see. I'm pretty impressed though and will be looking to do more things on a small scale shortly.

Large Lizards

I was commissioned through Etsy to make some Escher Lizards but 10cm in size. I managed to squeeze 27 onto a sheet and they came out pretty well. The larger size feels nicer in the hand. I even relisted them on Etsy. They can be done plain or with Mahogany or Oak wood stain or with a colour wash of any other colour.

27x lizards in one colour £20 + £3.50 worldwide shipping

Teeny Text

It's another LARP related cut of a group emblem on spruce wood dog tag stylee, which is why I haven't led with a whole item picture. Instead I wanted to show people the awesomeness that is the teeny tiny text of this item. I tried to etch the font because I thought that would produce a better image but it just wasn't readable, as a last ditch attempt I switched across to a low power cut, assuming that there would be insufficient step size to engrave such a small item. I was certainly wrong about that, the teeny tiny text here is testament to the awesomeness of laser cutting, I'll be looking to do more with this.

Dragon Tokens

Another group emblem for LARP, this time I tried to add an interesting Red/Black paint effect to the wood before it was cut. The red dried quite a bit darker but you can still see signs of the effect on the token, it's a bit more interesting than plain red.

Laser Cut Leather

I know leather can be laser cut, I've been asked to cut leather a good dozen times but the truth is that I don't have any leather and I don't know anything about leather which leaves me in a dubious position that I wouldn't know what to buy and how much to pay for it. So I finally found a compromise, somebody sent me some leather that they wanted cutting, I get the practice and the experience and I return the finished item no charge. And here are the results, I'm pleased and surprised how thick I could cut through, it's fairly stinky stuff though.

Veg plot labels

The veg plot in our garden has taken nearly a full year to get anywhere but I made a conscious effort this summer to fill it with soil and put some vegetables in it. Now we have rows of seeds and seedlings I wanted to identify each of the vegetables. Everything can be solved with a laser cutter so I made these labels up with a nice big font so that Eli can read them. The best thing is that they all came from scraps that I'd normally throw away.

Rune Tags

One of the nice things about empire was that groups tried to get some uniformity amongst themselves, our group had brown and mustard clothing on left and right, other groups had little trinkets like this to suggest they were all healers. It's hard to imagine that the next game is only 2 weeks away now, I'm hoping for another flood of orders again :)

Project #24 Mazing 2

I mentioned this briefly before but I tidied it up a lot in time for the maker faire and added a few features to it.

It's a CNC controlled marble in a maze, the X and the Y are belt driven rather than the more common tilt mechanism. The intent was to persuade people to type in a series of simple programming type commands to drive the ball around the maze from the start point to the end point. I'm pretty sure people didn't see it as programming which is probably a good thing as they were too busy having fun with it. I housed the electronics on top of the board so people could see the details, put in a compass and a scale and gaffa taped a hinge so that the whole thing could flip up and people could see the underneath. 

24 Projects/ 28 weeks

In essence it's a very simple XY control, but to add some programming aspect to it I set up the arduino to understand a very basic language sent over the serial port. 'N10,E10' would move the ball 10 units north, then 10 units east. I went with 10 units for 1 square because then you could also do movements smaller than 1 square. The distance requested was simply scaled by a factor for the number of steps required and then the code loops until the IO lines have been toggled the appropriate number of times.

For a project on such a short time scale you have to use what's at hand. The XY frame is from a 3020 laser cutter spares I had lying around after the laser cutter fire. The stepper motor drivers are big beefy Keling 4030s I had left over from my failed CNC milling machine and surely everyone must have an arduino or two kicking around by now. Magnets from the gauss gun kits and ball bearings from Donkey Kong. In fact the coding took significantly longer than the mechanical design and assembly.

Version 1 of the code featured a very simple parser of the incoming serial string, it only recognised N,S,E,W and only in capitals. After the first day of the maker faire I vowed to make some serious changes to the way it worked and an extra hour of coding on the Sunday morning made a world of difference. The final version of the code accepts upper or lower case, NE,SE,NW,SW for diagonal movements (although NE10, moves north 10 and east 10 which imo is simpler than calculating the hypotenuse and having to type NE14), and some limit checks which count the number of steps made in any direction and stop you from running it into walls. These step counts are also used to return the ball to the start at the end of every run meaning that you have to type a complete string of instructions to achieve the goal.

Even though it's nothing special I thought I'd share the source code too.

I figure this is the optimal route through the maze.