FabLab.nl

Together with designers and makers from Berlin and London, ProtoSpace is proud to take part in DesignSmash! Hop over to ProtoSpace this Saturday evening (November 20th) and watch designs come live! http://design-smash.com

3…2…1… The horn blows and a group of designers throw back a stiff drink before plunging into a frenzy of work.

They are producing a laser-cut object… a design that will hit the shelves in under a week. They have 4 hours to accomplish what most do in a month, but armed with liquid bravery, a bit of training and all the materials they need, they smash out a design as you party around them. At the end of the night, you decide who gets the biggest prize and the pieces are produced in front of you… on-the-spot.

Welcome to DesignSmash!

The Ceremony

3pm Designers gather on-site to be briefed by host & manufacturer. Briefing includes file formats and requirements as well as safety training in laser cutting and hands-on tips & tricks.

6:00pm First non-designing attendees arrive. Welcome drinks.

6:30pm The theme for the design tournament is introduced.

7pm Count-down & first round of shots. Designers retreat into the roped-off designers area and start hacking.

8/9/10pm A horn signals to designers that one hour has passed. Shots for all designers. The party picks up.

11pm A horn signals the end of the design phase, finished designs are submitted.

12pm Files are cut and assembled by the designer. The product is displayed on a photographic panorama, documented and published live to the website.

Email anu@protospace.nl or joris@protospace.nl, if you’d like to compete as a designer or sign up for the event on Facebook" alt="" />

For inspiration, these are just some of the things folks have been lasercutting this year at ProtoSpace

After the workshop last week Friday on experimenting with Lego Mindstorms and Arduino open source hardware, I returned to the ProtoSpace FabLab in Utrecht today. This time around it was all about learning to work with the machines the FabLab is equipped with: a laser cutter, a vinyl cutter, a milling machine and a full colour 3D printer. 

The impressive bit of FabLab is not the fact that the type of machines it offers exist. The impressive part is that you can get these machines to do your bidding by feeding it things as simple as PDF files. You create your model or drawing and then basically hit the print button, select ‘laser cutter’ instead of your regular ink jet printer, and watch the machine get to work.

We played with the 3D full colour printer, which is very impressive.
In the 5 minute video below I documented the whole process. From the example object, to making 7 smaller copies of it. 3D printing is time consuming, but you can do amazing things with it.

Siert and I created a card board casing for Arduino boards to prevent it from short-circuiting because of the surface it is lying on. For the first version I simply drew a first sketch in Neooffice (the Mac version of Open Office), in a text document. I then imported that text document as PDF into Corel Draw on one of the PCs in the FabLab and hit the print button. The lasercutter cut a piece of card board according to my sketch, which assembled resulted in the first version of our Arduino holder.


Version 1.0 of Arduino board holder

Then Sierts education as an engineer kicked in and he adapted the design into version 2.0. Again hitting Print resulted in a handful of pieces of cardboard coming out of the lasercutter that fitted snugly together. Who would have guessed I could be so pleased with a few bits of card board?


Version 2.0 of the Arduino holder

The video below shows another run with the laser cutter for a different item (part of a 3D game board)



Last week as well as today I made a point of showing the other participants how easy it is to share pictures and video of what you are doing while you are doing it. To help lower the threshold for them to start sharing their FabLab work as well.

(crossposted from my blog at Interdependent Thoughts)