Next Fab Studio

RED BULL FLUGTAG!!!!!!! This is a FREE Event!
We are ready to launch in less than 48hrs.
Where can you see this happen?
Camden Waterfront
When?
September 4 – Gates open: 11:00AM, First Flight: 1:00PM, Last Flight: 3:30PM
WE LAUNCH FIRST… SO BE THERE EARLY

VOTE FOR NEXT FAB STUDIO AND THE FOUNDING FLYERS

Vote for the People’s Choice Craft. Text “(Team1″) to 72855. Vote up to 15 times, standard text and data rates apply. Participants will have a chance to win concert tickets from Live Nation. Voting opens Friday, Sept. 3rd at 11:00am

One of our members, David Holly, is working on making looms more affordable and accessible.  I think this is a great project.  Find out more at his website, pvcloom.com.

This has been in the works for a while.  I am very pleased to invite members and non-members to attend the Laser Cut Business Card Class.  Those are a few staff laser cut business cards (my website is down, just wait a week or so).  Did you know that people impress their friends and enemies with laser etched beef jerky business cards, or even an etched leaf?  Sign up here (good ole classes page on the website).  Specifics below.

Requirements:

• 5 person limit.  First come first served.
• Saturday, Sept. 25 from 2-4 p.m., and Wednesday, Sept. 29 from 6-8 p.m.
• $50.00 members/$75.00 non members.
• Class fees include an hour of machine time.   This is enough time to cut about 30 cards, however machine time varies widely with media.
• This is a 2 part class.  We will meet as a group and learn about laser cut business cards.  Then we will individually schedule a later time on the laser cutter to cut the cards.
• Class will go more smoothly if you’re proficient in some kind of CAD program.  NextFab Studio supports both Mac and PC platforms, the Adobe Creative Suite, Rhino, Solidworks, Corel Draw and many other programs.  If you have a specific software need let us know before class.
• Bring a sketch and media.  Paper and pencil sketches are great, but a digital file is best.  We can etch and cut just about anything in the laser.  Beef jerky, leaves, acrylic, poster board, but nothing with chlorine in it.  No pvc films or moleskine notebooks.  Let us know ahead of time what media you plan to use so we can research it.
• We will show examples of laser cut business cards then go over file setup and materials testing.  After the initial class meeting we will individually schedule an hour of supervised machine use, and you can come back and laser cut more cards.  This machine hour is included in the course fee.
• This course is not a substitute for Trotec I and II and does not include formal training on the laser.

18 servo walker, by Edwin Dertien

Hi Everyone! Sorry that it’s taken me this long to continue blogging about Fab6, but I’m a little intimidated about how many notes I have on what happened between Wednesday and Friday. The text document I created is somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 words, to give you a little idea. Anyway, I’ll start off with Wednesday and go through the events chronologically, like I did before.

The morning began with a quick recap of the previous two days, and a short ceremony to celebrate all the people whose birthdays would occur during the week of the conference. To make things a little more interesting, Dhananjay Gadre put together a small project using a microcontroller to make a group of LEDs resemble quivering candle flames. Then after we all sang the birthday song, the group leaned in and blew on the circuit board which slowly made the “candles” go out, then played its own monophonic version of the birthday song.

This was followed up by more presentations from labs participating in the conference. Highlights included:

• Ghana’s mobile FabLab, as well as their current work on a charcoal generating process using biomass rather than wood as an input;
• Kelly Snook, who is fortunate enough to run a FabLab for NASA scientists and engineers, but is also working with Imogen Heap outside of London to create a FabLab in the small community of Havering-atte-Bower;
• A student from Prague named Dalibor, who is working on starting a FabLab in the Czech capital;
• And a fabber from South Africa who has been working on an initiative to create an “interactive booklet” which runs on an mp3 player in order to teach children about road signs and moral issues in their community, among other things.

Read the rest of this entry »

I happened upon a refreshingly thorough page about how frequently a bicycle helmet ought to be replaced.  From the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute.  Of course.  Have a listen:

“The better 1970’s helmets were reasonably good ones, but were not quite up to current standards. It is probably time to replace that old Bell Biker, Bailen, MSR, Supergo or similar model from the 70’s or early 80’s. (We have a page up on replacing the Bell Biker.) The hard shells were great, but the foam liners were not thick enough to meet today’s ASTM or Snell standard. The Bell V-1 Pro was designed to today’s standards, but the foam is very stiff, and if you are over 65 you probably should replace that too. If you have one of the 1980’s all-foam helmets with perhaps a cloth cover, we would recommend replacing that one. Lab tests showed some years ago that bare foam doesn’t skid well on pavement, and could jerk your neck in a crash. The cloth doesn’t help much. In addition, some of them had no internal reinforcing, and they tend to break up in a crash. That’s not serious if you just fall, but if you are hit by a car the helmet can fly apart in the initial contact and leave you bare-headed for the crack on the pavement.”

Here’s the new electrostatic flock guns.  I’ve got a smaller one up at the top there and a medium sized one.  Medium is my favorite.  It’s now smeared with adhesive and looks like I’ve flocked for years with it.  The flocking is still a work in progress.

Here’s a detail shot of the smallest one. It’s also know as the Pocket Flocker (Pock Flock for when one is in a hurry).

And lastly, a snapshot of the flocking work station.  Sorry for the iPhone shots, I really wanted to get flocking.

Down the street from NextFab is Monell Chemical Senses Center, the world’s only independent, non-profit scientific institute dedicated to basic research on taste and smell. They recently released the results of a study on quinine, which is a common anti-malarial drug and a common component in tonic water.

Back in the days — especially during the British Colonial empire, in tropical Africa and South Asia — when tonic water was called such because it was, in fact, a tonic to fight malaria, the taste was overwhelmingly bitter for some people. Gin-and-tonics were created to make the consumption of tonic water more palatable. Nowadays, tonic water isn’t used for malaria, but medicinal quinine still is. However, the amount of quinine in modern tonic water — that is, when it’s actually quinine and not quinine flavoring — is a quarter- to half-percent of what a medical quinine concentration would be. The local bar is not, sadly, staving off malaria.

But back to the Monell study.

Read the rest of this entry »

The entrance to the FabLab in Amsterdam.

Before I get into the meat of the post, I thought I should put in a link to the “polycom” (EDIT: This link doesn’t work. THE LINK HAS BEEN FIXED, GO AHEAD AND GIVE IT A TRY) set up by MIT for people to stream the conference live. Unfortunately, Amsterdam is six hours ahead of Philly, so when we get started at 8:30 am, it’s 2:30 in Philly. Either way, give it a try between now and Friday, and maybe you can catch some Fab talk or see a little bit of what is going on.

It’s been an exciting few days so far at Fab6 in Amsterdam. After an opening night dinner at a restaurant built almost entirely of IKEA furniture, and an extremely DIY meal, we started bright and early Monday Morning. Unfortunately, I think I lost a page of notes from my first day at some point today (I think someone sketched something on the back of the page and then tore it out of the book during the projects session today), but that’s what inspired me to get a blog post done tonight, while everything is still fresh in my mind. I also have quite a few pictures (sorry for the lack of really quality pictures, these were all taken with my phone), which I will sprinkle liberally throughout the post. Read the rest of this entry »

So the blogging has been a little light lately.  Here’s a little Friday (Sundays are our Fridays!) picture.

This looks to be a laser cut cross stitch pendant.  I don’t know anything about it, except that you could make that here.  Via The Laser Cutter.  Another flocking post is on the way.

Also in the Laser Cutter post,  something called the workroom.  It’s a space  in Toronto, kind of like NextFab, but for sewing.  Sounds good to me.

Pretty cool stuff.