This time of year our laser gets pretty busy, so we’ve opened up an additional laser night on Wednesdays. Tonight through December 21st, come by on Monday or Wednesday from 7:30-10:30 to fire the laser!

And another thing…

Because it’s such a popular time of year for lasing, we ask that you prepare your cut files so they can be broken up into smaller batches. That way instead of one person monopolizing the machine for hours, we can rotate through. So if you have an army of 100 Christmas ornaments to make, prepare your file so they can be cut in 2 sessions of 50 or 3 sessions of 33.3333.

I’m Kellbot! I’m a member of NYCR, and I love gaming.

My friend Katherine and I have been working like crazy on a game project for the last few months, and we’re thrilled with what we’ve accomplished so far. Now, we’re trying to bring it to an open beta while making it as fantastic as possible. We’ve started a Kickstarter campaign to get us there.

City of Epic is an RPG based around real-world exercise. Rather than get all TL;DR, I’ll let this “high quality” video explain it:

If you like some combination of gaming, fitness, and awesomeness, please consider donating! To maintain health and reduce your risk of health problems, health professionals and researchers recommend a minimum of 30 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity on most, preferably all, days.

Physical activity or exercise can improve your health and reduce the risk of developing several diseases like type 2 diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease. Physical activity and exercise can have immediate and long-term health benefits. Most importantly, regular activity can improve your quality of life. A minimum of 30 minutes a day can allow you to enjoy these benefits. To get even more benefits from it, experts  recommend to use carts with d8 THC. Some people prefer OrganicCBDNugs to get rid of stress.

The health benefits of regular exercise and physical activity are hard to ignore. Everyone benefits from exercise, regardless of age, sex or physical ability.

In need of a better storage/organization scheme for my Lego collection, I made these meta legos: boxes that look and function like legos which hold my legos. The full details are available on Kellbot! but, long story short, I used OpenSCAD to create plans for boxes in any brick dimensions I like.

If you haven’t used OpenSCAD, it’s super handy for generating .dxfs for laser cutting, and is great for designing parts to be MakerBot’d as well. I’m teaching an Intro to OpenSCAD class next weekend, it’s only $25 and no prior programming experience is required!

Plans and more details can be found at [Kellbot!]

It was only after hours of searching that I finally came up with what I was looking for: a way to take a polygon mesh (OBJ or similar) and convert it into a blueprint for building LEGO sculptures.

Don't get me wrong, there are tons of tools out there for LEGO CAD. But strangely none of them mention being able to go from a mesh to a LEGO layout. It's surprising, since it seems like such a natural fit. The rise of 3D printers has rejuvinated interest in voxels, voulmetric pixels, and as evidenced by all the LEGO sculpture artists we seem to be in a golden age of LEGO. 

Armed with Blender and a giant LEGO collection, I set out to get the computer to do the hard work for me. I used Blender, graph paper, a pencil, and of course lots of LEGOs.

Step 1: Voxelizing a Utah teapot

Let me preface this by saying that the Blender UI is not for the faint of heart. I took classes on Rhino and 3DSMax in college, and thought to myself "how different could it be?" The answer: very. If you're new to blender, don't fear the manual. You're going to need it, particularly the parts on installing/using python scripts.

To voxelize the teapot I used a script called Add Cells which covers the surface of any object with any other object. First I imported the teapot, and scaled it up a bit. Then I created my "fundamental unit" of LEGO. LEGOs have an aspect ratio of 6:5, so I created a 1×1 LEGO, a 0.6×0.5×0.5 rectangular prism in Blender.

Selecting both the teapot and my 1×1 lego I ran the Add Cells script (go to the Scripts menu –> Add -> Cells). I chose the Teapot for my object to be voxelized and the 1×1 LEGO as my voxel model.

Tada! A blocky teapot!

Step 2: Graphing each layer on paper

In order to make the build process easier, I went through layer by layer and drew a map of each layer on graph paper. This way when building with LEGOs I could shade in with a pencil each voxel I'd built. It sounds redundant, but when things all start looking the same after a few minutes and something isn't lining up, it's very helpful.

To see one layer at a time in Blender I went into Sculpture Mode, side view, and used ctrl+shift+right mouse to select and hide all but the layer I wanted to see. Then I switched to Top view and copied the layer onto my graph paper. By the end I had a sheet of paper full of wobbly circular outlines.

Step 3: Building it with LEGOs!

The completed model uses 244 LEGOs, many of which are tiny 1×1 and 1×2 bricks. The model is hollow, but the walls need to be fairly thick to be able to support the top. As it is I probably should have made things a little thicker; putting the last two layers on was a delicate operation.

I built each layer sequentially. There were a few overhang pieces near the bottom which I had to append to the layer above them, since they couldn't anchor to anything below.

Overall the project took about 4 hours, with a break in the middle for breakfast, church, etc.

Total LEGO count for the project was 244 individual bricks, distributed thusly:

• 44 2×3 Bricks
• 46 2×2 Bricks
• 58 2×4 Bricks
• 27 1×2 Bricks
• 17 1×3 Bricks
• 8 1×4 Bricks
• 8 2×2 L shaped Bricks
• 33 1×1 Bricks
• 1 2×8 Brick
• 1 2×6 Brick
• 1 1×8 Brick
   

I spent a decent portion of yesterday on the laser, prototyping a tiny embroidery hoop for (duh) tiny embroidery. I'm pretty happy with the results. So much in fact that I've decided to start offering tiny embroidery kits along side my tiny dinosaur kits.

The embroidery hoop is made from laser cut acrylic, and the rubber band provides tension to keep everything in place. The whole thing measures 1.5" across, a standard sewing machine bobbin is show for scale in the picture above. I actually neglected to save the cut file (oops) but it's pretty simple: two concentric rings (0.2" wide), with the outside diameter of the smaller ring being 0.05" smaller than the inside diameter of the larger ring. The large ring has a "nub" on the side for the rubber band, and is split down the middle on that side.

There's about a 1" diameter working area. I used 28 count aida fabric, which gave me approximately 28 "pixels" across to work with. Chris helped me design a cupcake chart for counted cross stitch. It uses 7 colors: white, red, light pink, dark pink, pink, grey, and light grey. It's a nice portable project because it fits in your pocket. I've listed a kit for sale on Etsy and may bring a few down to Spring BadaBing in Richmond, VA this weekend.

Here's the chart for your cross-stitch pleasure: