I love this — a laser cutter just powerful enough to cut vinyl, but that’s great for creating your own PCBs. Are you sick and tired of using a tooth pick to apply solder paste? Are you still using through hole components because you don’t want to deal with soldering surface mount devices (SMD)? If […]
Charles Guan is an MIT alumnus, and has been making projects that have been festive and amazing over the past few years. Charles has been influential in the MIT Makerspace/club MITERS, where students create all manner of great projects. He and MITERS members have been frequent fliers at various Maker Faires, so you may already be familiar with his work.
Charles has served as a Teaching Assistant at MIT in Mechanical Engineering, helping his fellow students to fabricate the contraptions of their dreams. As a TA, he’s heard the same questions over and over, so he created some instructional documentation to make his and his fellow students’ lives easier. This was a set of lectures and handouts he called How to Build Your Robot Really Really Fast (HTBYRRRF). In more recent times, he set out to update this as a more inclusive set of building guides. Drawing from his own online documentation, he was able to codify his ideas into a thorough Instructable: How to Build Your Everything Really Really Fast, or HTBYERRF.
The laser cutter is an amazing machine. The level of precision is impressive — it can transform a digital rendering into a beautiful object, being faithful to the exact design, down to the smallest detail. Flickr user Greyerlynx used a laser cutter to immortalize his 1986 VW Vanagon in a five-layer cutaway. I think it’s […]
I was asked to be one of the judges in the You Fab 2012 laser cutter design contest, based in Tokyo. There were so many terrific entries that it was hard to pick the winners.
Our fantabulous Sales & Marketing Coordinator, Gillian BenAry, hipped us to this awesome application of the laser-cutter: designer nori rolls. Quick, do it for beauty and frivolity before sushi restaurants start selling display ads on your dynamite rolls! Designer Nori: Delicate Laser Cut Seaweed Patterns
Shibuya, Tokyo is now home to Fab Café, a coffee house with a public use laser cutter. Just walk in with a vector design and your material and enjoy a cup of coffee while the laser does its thing.
I’ve been meaning to do some tests with this relatively new technique for creating flexible parts on the laser cutter. I’ve been meaning to build a new project box for my Arduino. Oomlaut beat me to both! Ever since we came across this amazing technique for laser cutting hinges we’ve been thinking about what we could […]
