Hello! Nikki here doing my first weeknotes. So where should we start for this week? In a break from the CNC mill Chris made some brackets on the laser cutter for limit switches on an Eleksmaker. The Acker’s bell build is ongoing, largely still machining pentagons in plywood, but very close to a full prototype. Having the pieces out on the desk at makernight prompted a lot of discussion, and opinions about design tweaks.

The most exciting part of this week was having Sophie Huckfield come visit us on Friday working on improvements for her Break the Frame project.

It’s built on an Eleksmaker CNC X-Y plotter platform, and we added some limit switches to let it home to work out its position automatically when it’s turned on. Then we paired that with a Raspberry Pi and some software that we wrote to initialse the plotter and then drop into a loop feeding it a custom GCode file over and over. That will let Sophie install the artwork in a gallery and leave it performing.

Obviously the video is not very exciting but it is a proof of concept and evidence of it working. I got to sit in on the process and also got to have a (very supervised) go at playing with the laser cutter while Chris was making the limit switch brackets for the project. Giving me a nice basic run through of how that worked.

As you can tell by virtue of me writing this, we have managed to get Jekyll up and running on my computer so I’m able to do more blog posts and do a few minor website updates(coming this week hopefully!) So progress and all is looking bright and shiny for the week ahead, and hopefully you will be hearing from me again sooner rather than later.