Miscellaneous Creations

Laser Cutting Experiment on Black Cast Acrylic (Friday, 9/20/2024)

I experimented with laser cutting on black cast acrylic, trying out two different pieces of artwork:

1. Syd Mead Futuristic Car Showcase

The first image was a Syd Mead artwork of a futuristic car showcase. I converted the image to grayscale and started with a test cut (17.5cm x 8cm), which had a bit of pixelation and inverted coloring. The deeper laser cutting into the black acrylic made the pixels lighter rather than darker, resulting in an inverted appearance.

Test Cut with Inverted Colors

Here is the test cut I made before doing the larger version:

For the final larger copy, I applied color inversion to the grayscaled image before laser cutting to achieve the correct effect. The final dimensions were 15.5cm x 33cm, and I cut in rasterized mode. Here’s how it turned out:

2. Dragon Ball Z - Goku Charging Up

The second image was a panel from Dragon Ball Z featuring Goku charging up. I converted the image to grayscale and applied a similar laser cutting process, cutting it at 10in x 10in.

The final result looked great and captured the energy of the character perfectly:

Alien Chestburster Print (Wednesday, 10/2/2024)

On Wednesday, October 2nd, I used two Prusa printers at EDS to print a life-size Alien chestburster. I bought the design online for $7, which included the chestburster and a chestplate. I printed the chestburster in black PLA and the plate in white PLA. Below are images of the designs in the slicer and the final products.

The chestplate took less than 4 hours to print, but the chestburster took around 9-10 hours overnight.

If I were to do this again, I would modify the supports for the alien to avoid only using build-plate supports. This would have prevented some of the manual clipping I had to do for the overhang areas.

RFID Wand Upgrade (Friday, 10/4/2024)

For my Week 4 Elder Wand project, I wanted to give it a functional upgrade — the ability to open doors! This meant adding RFID capability. I bought NTAG215 10mm NFC tags, but unfortunately, I realized the tags' UIDs couldn’t be overwritten with my 4-byte UID from my Mifare Classic MIT ID.

With the help of JD, I found a different sticker that supported Mifare Classic and used a Proxmark device to clone my MIT ID onto the sticker. Next, I used acetone to melt the sticker down to its bare circuits, which I then glued onto the tip of my wand.

Now, my Elder Wand has an RFID function that I can use to open doors!