THE #fuckinlasersyall SAGA CONTINUES.
As soon as I knew lasercutting was a thing that I could do, the idea to make my own perfect table popped into my head. I was getting a bit sick of the wooden table that I've had for the last five years. The thing is way too large and heavy for what I needed, especially in my small room. The trestles underneath it are permanently in the way and recently the monolith started to sag. Good thing it was just a freebie from an acquaintance anyway.
In recent months I've been experimenting with lasering maps. It's a great way to flex my GIS and Illustrator muscles and lasercut maps just look so incredibly cool. Last week I decided to pick the beautiful Two Point Equidistant projection (currently my favourite) to lasercut. The cutter isn't enormous so I had to print it in two parts of 50x75cm a.k.a. 20x30". To make the table a bit more rectangular I added 10cm (4") wide parts later on both sides. With help from my dad, we made a basic support layer out of cheap scaffolding boards. We also added a layer of PMMA (Perspex) to protect the lasercut and because it makes the table infinitely cooler.
Because this table is smaller, I was able to rearrange my room again. (For the eighth time in 2 years. Never settle for good enough, kids.) I had also spent some time this week to improve my Raspberry Pi based train departure information screen. It's finally able to auto-boot into Chromium after a mere six different attempts and four hours of finding the precise place to put my single line of bash code into. It works now, so I added it to my desk setup. With the new table in place and cables "managed", it's perfect now:
Up next: more maps, definitely. Stay tuned!
(elizabeth: I used Lightroom's Photomerge to stitch together 5 50mm shots to make that photo. It's really good, you should totally learn how to master that feature. :) )
1. Dis sexi 2. I'm jelly 3. Kendrick 4. Good work
Looks great. Also, this might be the only side-independent way of portraying Earth's geography as a design element. Do a straight cylindrical projection, and it turns one-sided.
That projection is very distorted in terms of representing equal areas for features near the poles vs. near the equator. Veen's mapping is most distorted for the longitudes furthest from the center of the map, among other things. Any way you map the features of spherical shell to a flat surface, it'll never be perfect. Curivilinear coordinates are like food poisoning to most. It's nobody's fault. Hey, in other news, I heard that the flat-Earthers have gone global.
Wasn't talking the quality of projection. Imagine putting a map onto a surface - say, the top of the laptop. When it's closed and facing you (as in, South America at the bottom), it looks fine. When it's open, to the outside observer it's inverted vertically. Not good. Reverse the positioning, and you get the reverse reactions. In other words, a design concern rather than cartography's.
Love it! Well done. Spent the morning at the nearby highschool (there aren't many nearby highschools in rural Norway) where I'm allowed to play with their laser cutter. Only my second day on it, they've used it only for glass engraving so I'm the guinea pig for cutting plywood. Got some good results today but plenty to learn. I'm prototyping puzzle pieces that will become products - fun and exciting work. My secondary goal is to develop a clean workflow to go from Sketchup Make to a laser cut piece in the correct size as designed in SU, using freeware programs like Vectr and Acrobat. I can't use Inkscape because it cheats and doesn't export vector graphics. What software do you use?
Thanks! Protip: Google [whatever material you want to use +] MSDS to get the Material Satefy Data Sheet. It tells you exactly what kinds of fumes might arise when lasercutting materials. MDF and triplex/multiplex is usually good. Every makerspace keeps a list of materials used (type of material, thickness, cut settings, results) and I highly suggest you do the same, as it allows you to get a good feel for how speeds, power settings and materials interact. I'm not even doing any 3D designing. Only Adobe Illustrator and imagination here. I kind of like the mental challenge of designing something that's not flat using only flat cuts and materials, but that's just me. By the way, maybe Autocad is something for you? Most lasercutters take DXF, and there are tons of 3D applications that can export to Autocad.
I'm a sucker for maps. I played around with trying to designed a laser cut topographic map once but was never satisfied.