I also designed and engraved around 70 wood tiles for the game. The original game only has 64 pieces, but I added some so that the game could be played with six people instead of five. You can see the original file that I created and the printed tiles below. I used a thicker wood than craft board for durability, so I had to vector cut the tiles multiples tiles so that they would come out cleanly.

Wooden game pieces (there are lots more...)

All the troops meeples lined up

I faced a few challenges with this project, including getting the black and white threshold to a point that worked for both the image and the text. Originally, whenever I got the text to the right contrast, the image would be too light and wouldn't pick up the detail of the mountains. So I ended up changing the contrast on the original image of just the mountains so that it was more easily adjusted in the laser engraving software. I also had to figure out the best way to center the image on the piece of wood. I ended up using the tool that traced the pathway of the laser a lot before pressing "print" to get it as close as I could. It isn't a symmetrical piece of wood, so it would be impossible to center it between all points perfectly, so I did the best I could, and I am quite pleased with the result. Hopefully they will like it, too! 

So we had fun last week at the Makerspace playing around with the laser engraver and seeing what it would do with a photo of a face. This is pretty tricky, because all of the colors that add detail and dimension to faces have to be converted into a dichromatic image. We tried this photo of our little brother, David, and I am quite pleased with the result! It definitely looks like him from far away, but when you get really close the shading on the eyes looks pretty weird. Anyway, I thought it was a neat prototype. Let the experimentation continue! 

For my first 3D printing assignment ("print something!"), I decided to print parts for a hydroponics system designed by an organization called 3Dponics. Hydroponics is a form of gardening that grows plants by providing them nutrients through water rather than soil. Gravel is typically used in the containers to give the plant's roots structure. Hydroponics systems expand the possibilities of growing food in urban environments and growing lots of food in a little bit of space. Disney Epcot has a great example of a very elaborate hydroponics garden (photo below). If you'd like to try this project yourself or find out more, the instructions can be found at https://www.3dponics.com/instructions/.

Disney Epcot Hydroponics Garden

I printed five drip nozzles, which screw onto two liter bottles and drip water at a steady rate for optimum health of the plants. I also printed the conduit piece, which goes into the reservoir and connects the tubing to the aquarium pump to keep the system running smoothly. Finally, I attempted to print a silencer that goes at the top of the system on the end of the tubing to make it quieter. Check out the diagram from 3Dponics below to get a clearer idea of what parts I am talking about.

3D Printed Drip Nozzles

Silencer- Hollow on the inside

3Dponics Schematics

 Since the plans were already designed and available for free as an STL file, I simply loaded them into the software in the 7hills makerspace, arranged them how I wanted and pressed print. One challenge I had was cleaning off the additional plastic support that the printer built up to make sure that they wouldn't collapse during the making. Particularly with the conduit and the silencer, the extra plastic was very difficult to clean out in the hollow space (and I'm still not sure I got it all!). I did not expect to need to spend so much time cleaning off the extra plastic after printing. Also, one of my nozzles was warped a bit during printing, but I think that it will still work fine.

Warped Drip Nozzle

I have not set the whole system up yet, but I hope to in the next couple weeks and will update this post to show pictures of the whole system running once I do!