As surprising as the appearance of the building was, what was inside was even more spectacular. After my phone had told me that I was still 7 min away at 1:58 I knew that this would not be the case. When Professor Sachdev told us to meet at the “Fab Lab” for last week’s class, I was expecting a very high-tech building, somewhere near the heart of campus. Posted in Week6 | Leave a reply Week 6 Fab Lab Reflection This feels like 3d printing, but almost in reverse: cutting away material to make an indentation and a shape top-down instead of creating a shape, figure or structure from nothing. Its amazing how similar I found this to 3d printing, mainly because of the rastered frosted glasses and acrylic pieces that had shapes and images made with the lasers. Every material has certain settings for different materials, and I used a Moleskine notebook to decorate the cover with the design in the image. The lasers themselves can either raster or vector, meaning it can chip away a material to a certain thickness, or it can completely burn a hole (and eventually a shape) through the material. Making vectors avoids the distortion of pixels that happen in images. We started off learning about Inkscape and how to fix document sizes, make vectors off of image formats such as JPEG, Bitmap and PNG. The Fab Lab is divided into two weeks, one half being working with lasers, and the other will have digital embroidery. That fact alone made this class the best one yet. Mainly because I got to work with lasers. Last week was our first day at the CUC Fab Lab, Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab.

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