Last week was our last week at Fab Lab in Champaign, and for me, it was the most helpful workshop because I learned something that is easily transferable to my semester long project, the spaceship.

We learned how to program arduinos to do something simple, like blink an s.o.s., or turn on LEDs when a sensor detects darkness. It gave me an idea to apply clusters of LEDs to the “radiation bays” on my ship.

I would carve out enough space in the inside so that someone can put in a nano arduino and program the lights to do whatever they want. It plays further into letting my readers personalize their ships.

I also found out about the plethora of other sensors that are available outside of light sensors, including motion sensors. These will help if I design a different, bigger ship that has a giant rotating ball for gravity.

I also went with the class to Deloitte in Chicago to visit the Greenhouse they have there. I was really interested in the process of business consulting and it helped me learn more about it.

As the semester moves forward, I intend to finish my ship and update it on thingiverse.

In the past two weeks I have done stitching at the FabLab, participated in Make-a-thon and continued working on my final project.

So, first it was an interesting experience using “3D” sewing machines at the Fablab. I decided to make a bear. I first downloaded a black and white picture from the web and then edited it a little bit and added a brown color to the bear. And it was ready to go to the sewing machine.

It’s kind of cool that it shows a picture of the bear on its small screen. By putting a string in the right place on the machine (there are 7 steps to do it) it was ready to start stitching.

That is how it looked in the beginning….the bear had legs and the head was to come soon. Essentially, the machine did everything for me, I just had to wait for it to be done.

Here is the ready bear….but something else had to be done. I cut off the extra white material around the bear and put a sticky paper on the back side of the bear. Then I ironed it so some strings in the back wouldn’t stand out. And this is how the final product looked like.

Then, on April 12th my teammates and I participated in Make-a-thon. It was a great event that allowed many people to try their skills in creating/making something new. The topic of the event was a “Senior accessibility”, which meant to create something that would help elder people in their day to day activities. We created a sensor on a pill box which elder people would use to keep track when they need to take their medication. Then we also wanted to create a wristband that would receive notification of when to take the medication. However, our project is not complete, and we are still working on finalizing it.

Here is Amanda Kowalski working with arduino to make the sensor functioning.

This week we were originally be going to do a collaborative showcase of our work with the Making Things class in the BIF, but last minute we decided to push our portion of the showcase back so we could have more time to prepare and show off more of what we’ve worked on in class by holding it at the end of the semester.   Instead of scrambling to get everything done for the showcase then, we had “free time” in the lab to work on our semester projects. Sam and I worked on assembling our second Raptor hand (an all white one this time) and looking for places we could source the materials from instead of having to buy a full kit each time.  Putting the hand together this time was a bit faster than the last since we knew what we were doing and had the tricks figured out for the tougher parts (file down the pieces if you can’t fit them together, use a safety pin to get the elastic through the holes, etc.)

Since its hard to have two people work on the hand at once, Sam mostly worked on assembly, while I looked for places to buy the materials for future hands from. Most of the stuff was pretty easy to find on Amazon, except for the screws which I will probably look for at a local hardware store.  Since finding materials didn’t take too long, I had some time at the end of class to check out Thingiverse play around with 3D modeling and ended up using the MakerBot Customizer tool to design and print a new case for my iPhone. I printed it out in white plastic on the Generator and I’ve been enjoying showing it off to my friends the past few days.

This was the second week at Fab Lab. The class got chance to switch to different projects. My new object was using laser machine to carve patterns on hard materials, like plastic, glass, wood and so on. I copied a pattern which combines word “Chicago” and several of its famous buildings as the background on a piece of wood. The following are pictures of the view of the piece on computer, during working, and after completed.

The last picture showed the first piece of my project. It has a little hole on letter “A” that it is a little blemish. I fixed with the software and came out a perfect one. The reason I picked up this design is because I used to live in Chicago for years before I came to Champaign for college. It is like souvenir reminding me of the days back then. The two holes are for hang up on high places. I haven’t decided where to put it. But, it seems to fit into any place.