Last night I found this in my fortune cookie. I have no idea if my local chinese food place got shipped some novelty fortune cookies, or if this is simply a real case of error messages making it into my food. Either way, I am deeply concerned.
I wanted to see what would happen if I put a ceramic (stoneware) dish under the lazzzor. I started with the settings for etching glass, but the laser handbook only recommends raster settings, and I wanted to try vector engraving as well, so I tried a bunch of variations.
In the above image, I rubbed a bit of pencil graphite into the engravings to make them more visible. My favorite vector setting was 100% speed, 50% power (on the 35W Epilog). Slower speed or more power raised an ugly lumpy bead of molten glaze, but 100/50 gave a nice smooth scratch.
For my raster test (lower left in the image), I used the recommended settings for glass at 600dpi: 35% speed, 10% power. It looked just fine so I didn’t try any other settings.
I thought maybe I could melt through the colored glaze to reveal the white ceramic underneath, but that didn’t work.
The zigzag line in the above image was engraved at 75% speed/100% power, and the straight line at 14/100. Neither was able to make a white line through the blue glaze. I was afraid to go any slower, because there was already quite a lot of heat building up. Also, I’m thinking of doing this in bulk to a lot of dishes, so I’m ruling out any technique that goes slowly (and thus costs more).
James P Hogan may not be a name you are familiar with. I certainly wasn’t aware of him when I picked up this book on the recommendation of a friend. But, he is someone you should be aware of. His “The Giants” series of novels is superb science fiction. Before I get into the review itself, let me break the series down for you. There are 5 books total that have been written in the series. Book one “Inherit the Stars” was obviously written as a one off. But it proved to be hugely successful. And, I can see why. In spite of it’s almost hokey beginnings to book takes a die hard realist like me to places I never imagined going in a book… and more amazingly loving every second of it. So after being a huge success they went to book two, “The Gentle Giants of Ganymede.” The story continues! And it kept continuing for three more books after that. Each as good as the last.
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Courtesy Zach Hoeken's Flickr Stream. CC'ed
Every tech blog on the planet is covering CES. I’m not. I don’t get to spend a week in vegas hanging out and seeing the new technologies. I have to go to work. I cry, and sometimes I wonder what the whole point of it all is. But, at least some of our members aren’t confined to this special weekday hell that I am.
Makerbot Industries, co-founded by three of our members is manning a booth at CES!
I hear a lot of the technology this year is related to 3D. I guess a 3D printer is right up their alley. Personally, I’ve been pretty turned off to the whole 3D thing since Zaxxon. But, I try not to judge.
Also I heard there was some form of polar bear television on display there. Not sure why they’d want to encase a visual display device in the horrific visage of one of the worlds most infamous killing machines. I guess I’m just not up on what people want out of their electronics these days.
We got word today of a few e-waste recycling events coming up, sponsored by the nice people at the Lower East Side Ecology Center. All collection sites run from 10am to 4pm.
You can bring any kind of electronics for proper disposal; putting electronics in the trash means heavy metals and other nasty things can leach into the ground water, hurting everyone. This is a great way to get rid of that random trash you’ve kept around from all of your hacking projects.
The crew from Vice’s Motherboard.tv came out to talk with us a bit about the Hackerspace and DIY movements, and has put up their video today. Thanks to Alex and the rest of the crew, the video turned out great!
One of the busiest meeting nights in awhile. Just about standing room only.
First meeting of the new year!
Happy New Year Blog Readers! We read your comments. I promise to try and blog more. If you want to see more than the occasional completed project… then so be it!