A friend asked if I would do a table at their elementary school ‘STEAM faire’ using my desktop(Ortur 15W-input diode) laser and I’m looking for ideas. There will likely be over 200 students coming through and I was thinking that if I did some design using vectors( not rastering ) I might be able to keep the line moving.
200 students over a 5 hour period is just 90 seconds per student.
My suggestion would be to gang up say 45 different designs arranged in files containing 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 different parts and cut the file which matches the number of students present as groups walk up, then remove the cut stock and pass it to the group to divide amongst themselves so that you can clear the area for the next group — that will allow a cycle time of 7 and a half to 15 minutes which is probably a bit more workable.
Thanks William but I was not planning on doing any ‘cutting’ and if I can come up with a fun design or three which leaves room for a name and/or initials then I would pre-engrave the poggs with the design and only do the names or initials at the event.
I’d be footing the bill for the materials so that’s why I was thinking something inexpensive like a box of wooden poggs. I could also have some clips to turn them into tags if they so wanted.
The pog keychain plugs are rather small so I can’t see fitting that kind if detail on the pogs and there’d be no room for personalizations like a name or initials.
Also do not want to be doing raster engraving since it’ll take way to long. The design will have to be a vector design and then the name/initials would also be a vectored font.
The STEAM Punk Day finally went off after a rain delay and the project was a hit.
I was told I was 2nd behind the Slime activity for group size and excitement level and I went though nearly 200 pogs of the 400 I’d premade in about a 5 hour window.
The project started with this school logo:
And then this SVG image after using Inkscape for edge detection and vector manipulations and cleanup. Don’t tell anybody but I can see now that I got the curve radius for the green text wrong and I might have added vector segments at the end of the paw and at the Panda’s right ear to isolate the outline better:
And finally this was the engraving for the backs of the pogs
For the other side I did a simple Ring Gear around the periphery of the pog and inserted 3(feng shui) gears such that there was room for putting students name on the pogs at the event. The gear teeth meshing was taken into consideration.
I was not going to bring my K40 to the event to engrave the names and instead was going to use a small Ortur LaserMaster 1 diode laser(15W-input). So the night before the event(Friday) I setup a 6 pog layout using the wooden stencil and marked the 6 circles and orientation keys. And then I did a test and it FAILED! I’d forgotten that these pogs are too white and most all of the diode laser’s energy is reflected so no marking even at 90% power. After sleeping on it, I made a Baking Soda solution( 4 Tbsp baking soda to 1C water ) and it worked as long as I let it dry.
In the above image you can see most of the pogs have dried and left a yellowed streak. I used a 1" wide brush to apply instead of the spray bottle which was way too messy and wasteful.
The following are pics of the setup and activity. I’d also made a portable power system from a bunch of LiPoFe4 batteries( 120Ahr 13V ) and an 120VAC inverter just in case mains power was unavailable. Mains power was 20’ away so I didn’t need the portable power. The LM1+tablet pulled 37W engraving and 10W quiescent so it would have worked well for the 5 hours needed.
I ran LightBurn on the Linux Tablets(one of the free Hack-a-Day ex-Windows tablets) with a wireless keyboard so I could edit/enter names onto the layout in LightBurn.
