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Architectural Scale Model of Belfast

Working with the Forum for Alternative Belfast Fab Lab and Belfast City Council processes were developed to assist the group of architects in building a scale model of Belfast.

A 3d model of the city centre was drawn and process of how to create the buildings was experimented with using Fab Lab technology.

It was decided that the best and most workable results were achieved by slicing each of the virtual 3D buildings into series of 2D shapes so that they could be laser cut from 6mm Baltic birch plywood and reassembled back to form a wooden model of the particular building.

Colour changing Mood light

The Mood light is a small light that is powered by a 9v battery and controlled by programmable micro controller (Mini – computer), 

Mill, clean and tin all of the RGB boards

Load  RGB program onto chips using ATTINY44 programmer

Solder the pre-programmed chips and surface mount components to the RGB boards

Cut out a square of white acrylic that is 20cm by 20cm on with the laser cutter

Cut out the base and battery assembly

Heat the acrylic in the oven to 400 °Centigrade

Once heated remove from the oven and place on the mould

Reverse Graffiti

Text and images were imported from Photoshop into Partworks for editing in preparation to be cut on the shopbot .  The images had to adjusted slightly to ensure that all parts of the stencil would remain attached to the main body.  The font used in the text of the graffiti was chosen with this in mind too.

Using 8' x 4' sheets of 9mm builders Plywood the Shopbot carved the stencil taking three passes for each letter.