The sun comes out!

This is the view from my back porch when the sky is clear. It's strange to talk about the sun coming out when one know it's actually up there all day and all night; I guess it's really no different than talking about the sun being out in the daytime, except that it's kind of always daytime here. Anyway, we've been fabbing up a storm for the last couple of days. I spent quite a bit of time designing a laptop stand, which is something I've needed for a while.

The cardboard mockup makes it easier to see the form, since the final product is made of clear acrylic. I spent quite a bit of time getting the bend sequence, and temperature right, as well as embellishing the stand with engravings of bugs crawling all over it. This is the test card I made to get all my settings right; you can see the welder we use as an acrylic bender in the background (the heating element is a resistance wire clamped into the circuit).

The bending was a bit stressful, but it really turned out nicely. And the bugs look great.

The stand is super sturdy, gets the screen up at a good height, and allows me to stow my external keyboard underneath to open up space on my desktop (the physical one). I'll be bringing this home with me (actually, I'll be bringing home version 2.0 and leaving this one @ the lab). I'll also have the file, so if anyone wants to do a little acrylic bending clinic this fall, I'll help you make your own.

We've also used the vinyl cutter to cut out stickers and screen printing masks (which we used to print shirts and posters today), but most of my time in the last coupla days has been spent working on circuits.

We mill them on a Roland Modela mini mill, and then solder on all the components. These first several boards will all be "HELLO WORLD" boards, which respond to specific inputs in some way that lets you know you've put them together and programmed them correctly. Most, if not all, of these boards were designed by Neil Gershenfeld, who is the god of FabLab. His ability to run CAM directly from the command line is spoken of with (justified) awe. I'm looking forward to meeting him in Amsterdam later this summer.

Tomorrow we'll be loading programs onto our new boards, but tonight we took advantage of the clear sky and hiked up a little mountain to take some photos. It is said that this mountain is holy to the Sami people (the local indigenous reindeer herder types). This cryptic sign marks the top.

Roman set up a tripod and took bracketed 360 degree exposures with his Nikon DSLR so we can create an absurdly large HDR panorama; while we're waiting on that project, you'll have to make do with the image I took. 9pm, Norway time.