With the laser up and running, I wanted to try and dial in the settings to get good engravings and cut through some material. Most laser cutters are of the CO2 variety, which operate an order of magnitude faster than the MPCNC, and with two orders of magnitude more power.

There are lots of forum posts about setups similar to mine, but no two machines are alike, so I had to figure out my own parameters.

There seems to be a proliferation of inexpensive diode lasers available from overseas ranging from 1 to 15 W. It is somewhat concerning that someone can purchase such a high powered blinding device so easily. It is also very tempting…

Now that the MPCNC is assembled and wired up, it’s time to make something! I decided to start with some simple actions with a pen plotter and vinyl cutter.

Soon after finishing the initial build, which was significantly scaled down from my original plans, a garage unit opened up in my apartment. I had been keeping an eye out for this, so I leased one, and moved some things down to set up a small shop.

I used this newly acquired space to scale the MPCNC up to it’s intended size; a 2’ x 3’ working area.

After a few months of going back and forth on this idea, I decided to pull the trigger and build the Mostly Printed CNC (MPCNC). It is a CNC platform that can be assembled out of inexpensive electronics and hardware, EMT conduit, and 3d printed components.

Ryan at V1 Engineering sells a kit with all the electronics and hardware, leaving me to source a table, conduit, and print the parts. While waiting for the kit to arrive, I started the long process of printing.

A friend of mine recently joined the 501st, a group of Star Wars fans who cosplay in full sets of screen-accurate Stormtrooper armor for charity events. He opted for a biker scout variant, which includes a distinct laser pistol as a sidearm.

To help complete his set of armor, I printed a replica of this blaster.

Over Christmas, I took advantage of Google’s sale on the Google Home Mini to pick up a few for the apartment. Even though it doesn’t take up a lot of desk space, I wanted to mount it to the wall to keep it off the limited shelf space, and to hear it throughout the room. To resolve this, I came up with the following wall mount. The design started with a few reference images I found online. Using Fusion 360, I attached the images as a background canvas, scaled them according the measured width and height of my Mini. I then traced the profile using the spline tool, and revolved the profile around the center vertical axis of the device. This resulted in an accurate fit without having to make a bunch of measurements or figuring out the quantitative geometry of the device curves.

Over the past few years, I have acquired quite a video collection. Hundreds of files have been downloaded or DVDs ripped, resulting in nearly a terabyte of television and movies. I usually use Handbrake to rip files off a DVD, since it has several parameters that can be tweaked to give the ideal video output. I can easily name the file, specify an output format, and even create a queue for getting multiple videos from a disk. Handbrake does a great job with movies, since often it is a single file that needs extracting. TV shows are a bit more cumbersome, due to multiple disks being involved. For this reason, I have developed the following workflow to easily rip TV shows from a DVD set.

At less than $10, the Tertial lamp from Ikea is my favorite source of workspace illumination. So far, I have one in the garage over my workbench, and one over the desk in my office. They are easy to move into place, and will hold fast when let go. For the price, this lamp can’t be beat. The mechanics of these lamps is also interesting. Forces and torques are balanced through the weight of the lamp and counter-acting springs. Friction in the joints accounting for slight inequalities in the strict world of theoretical classical mechanics. All in all, the architect’s lamp is a useful platform for keeping a light bulb positioned and re-positioned precisely  where it is needed.

In collaboration with my university’s anthropology department, I had the opportunity to scan skeleton fragments with the intent to 3d print copies. Yesterday, I finally got a sample scanned and printed.

I placed the skull fragment on the rotating platform of a NextEngine 3d scanner, giving a full 360 degree view of the object. I did this twice at different orientations, and used the scanner software to fuse the scans together. This gave me a point cloud that covered most of the object. The point cloud was then converted into a 3d mesh, and exported as an STL file. The STL was imported into Autodesk Meshmixer. This free software was used to fill in holes the scanner could not resolve, and to reduce the triangle count of the STL file to make the model computationally easier to handle. This did result in some loss of resolution, but the printer used for fabrication would have lost these details anyway.