Tri State Area

During the quarter, I have been printing out sharks, I have printed out 2 new sharks which one I need to connect the head to the body still. It took around 15 hours to print all the sharks in total with one being really big and the printer stopping halfway through and then I had to print the head and a smaller one who came out just fine. There will probably be more tests including sharks in the near future as well.

This quarter I cut out a coaster from a plank of wood. I laser printed some art onto them, but I couldn’t figure out how to upload the picture. After that I coated it in oil so the water wouldn’t damage it.

Sofia Casalone

Basically, my goal with this project was to print out the digestive systems and make it colorful. For example, when people think of things being digested you think of food gettin grossly smashed together, so i thought i would picture the food nutrients being absorbed by the body in a much more pleasant way. i plan to draw vines representing the absorption and flowers representing areas the nutrients are absorbed to.

For my Makerspace project I am making a chess board. Im am not done with the board but what I have completed is getting the piece of wood I am going to use for the actual Board. I also have designed the board on Corel draw. Corel draw is a program on the computer where you can design whatever you want and later once you finished designing what you want to design you can cut it out on the CnC machine or the laser cutter.

Here are the pictures of my project so far

During this quarter of makerspace, I completed various mini projects. I reprinted tiles for Nina and Miya to decorate. For the font of these tiles, I did something different and used Sage’s own font design. I also completed putting two finished tiles onto the larger tile board. This process is fairly simple and involves taking another outline of a tile and gluing it to the back of the decorated tile. The tile backing has a hole cut out for a magnet so it can be stuck on the board. During the makerspace interim, I designed my own name tag using the laser cutter and attempted to make a map of Latin America. The map did not turn out according to plan, but I would like to try to re-do it.

During my time in maker space I designed two things. I first designed a coster out of wood from the laser cutter. I first went on computer that is connected to the laser cutter and designed the Penn State golf logo for a Christmas gift for my older sister. I then printed it and wrapped it up as a gift. I learned a lot from doing this project because I not only got to learn more about printing things on the computer and designing my own ideas. I also got to give back and make a gift that is useful. I than moved on too I different project which is still in the works. I wanted to design checker pieces to match with the chess board or a future checker board. I first took the circle wooden pieces and matched them by size, than Began to paint with yellow, blue, and pink on both sides. I than let them dry and will continue to finish the project over the next quarter. I will put photos of my progress in my next post. – Alex Nienhaus

I made 4 coasters using the laser cutter. First I got the pictures I wanted to pit on the coasters and then centered them in the circle. After printing them I made them water resistant and let them dry over the weekend.

I and a few other people have been working on setting up a fish tank for the Makerspace. So far, we have done a lot of research and created a list of materials that need to be bought in order for us to set up the tank.

I created a Ferris wheel but instead of the seats, I made them holders for Polaroid pictures. The first thing that I created was the two circles. I added holes in each section so that I could put them both together using a metal bar. I then got the size of the Polaroid but I needed a spacing between the front and the back so that the Polaroid could fit into it. I didn’t know if a piece of wood would be too thick but it ended up being perfect if I used the thinnest wood. I also cut a section out of the top so that clips could fit into it.

For the clips, I tried wood but the ends did not separate enough so I tried to 3D print them. I 3D printed clips and they worked well until I put everything together and realized that the clips were too big and the Ferris wheel did not work how I wanted it to so I designed clips using acrylic. I made these clips smaller and open on the bottom so that if one breaks I can put them on from above and they fit.

The sides of the Ferris wheel were a challenge because I had to line up the holes for the motor, Raspberry Pi, and the motor controller. I couldn’t line up the motor controller correctly so I ended up hot glueing it to the side.

I put the code for the motor onto the Raspberry Pi. I used the code from: https://github.com/lurbano/picoW-basics

Originally the base did not have the two pieces going to each side but I needed to add it so that the Ferris wheel would have more stability.

Putting it all together was a big challenge because there are so many components and it was very fragile. I connected a gear to the motor and hot glued another gear to the center bar that interlocked to the other gear. I hot-glued all of the bars together in the middle component and attached the Polaroid holder. The middle component needed to connect to the center bar but hot glue did not work so I used epoxy and it worked perfectly.