The LVL UP Maker Coin fiasco (turned out great) (part 2)

Previously on Ken Makes Mistakes: A mysterious box arrives. And now... The continuing adventure that is The LVL Up Maker Coin fiasco!

That box that showed up...

Yeah. That one. That contained a flat-packed laser engraver. You probably guessed that. Unless you didn't read part one of this saga before this, which seems silly and also SPOILERS.

The idea was, maybe I could find a way to laser engrave the LVL UP website into the maker coins I'd already printed. So, obviously, step one is to start calibrating and understanding this completely foreign machine.

Well, technically, step one was to assemble this thing. It was in a hundred pieces. 

Man, that looks easy. In real life, that took about 2 hours. You can see in the bottom of the flat-pack box photo that there's a DVD in a little blue sleeve. Oooh! Is it a Kung-Fu Panda 3 bootleg? Oh, to have your childlike wonder, you silly twit.

It was full of treasures, but chief amongst them were the Google-Translated Mandarin instructions and an assembly video narrated in broken English by a gentleman with what sounded like a death rattle of a cough. Since the narration was recorded separately from the video, that hacking cough could have been edited out. It was not. They might have edited in additional coughs. Point is, they were definitely aware of the coughing, and possibly even a little proud of it.

Surviving that, it was time to get to work. So I grabbed some scrap wood for calibration, donned the green safety goggles...

And I fired up the application supplied on the DVD. 

WHAT KIND OF JUST AND VERDANT GOD WOULD ALLOW SUCH HORRORS TO EXIST ON THE SAME EARTH AS MY BEAUTIFUL INFANT SON?

The application was... inelegant. In the same way that food poisoning is inelegant.

I spent literally a week researching and experimenting with various applications capable of running a laser engraver. One has a beautiful interface and does an outstanding job of turning an image into something burnable, but couldn't actually communicate with the laser engraver. Another communicated brilliantly, but was extremely particular about filetypes.

In the end, I wound up using one application for image-to-gcode conversion, and another for communicating with the laser itself. It's definitely not something I would recommend as a long-term solution, and it's very easy to forget the order of operations, but at least I could understand what the buttons were supposed to do.

No more waiting. Let's burn something.

Boom. The quality. The detail. The precision. I am unstoppable now. Tremble before the mighty awe of my robot laser.

Except, that's wood. That's what this laser is supposed to be good at. It's also not the medium it was purchased for. Let's engrave some plastic.

Uh. Not ideal. That sunken-in section to the right of the logo? The shiny divot you can kinda see? That's the website. Just type that into your browser. 

I started off trying a quick, shallow pass with the laser, but the coin is too shiny, and the laser just reflected off, wasting power. So I went for a second, and maybe even a third pass, but that just ended up pushing the PLA past its glass transition temperature, and I got a sinkhole. 

I came up with two theories. One: that glossy PLA was going to be trouble, but maybe a more light-absorbent color would work. And two: if I can't laser engrave plastic directly, maybe I could paint the PLA and then laser some of that paint off and clear coat it.

The black PLA definitely took the laser better. But that's a much larger size, and even still, there's not a lot of precision. It's still melted, but the melting is a little prettier.

As for laser paint removal, it seems that would be viable. I stopped the laser before it could finish, because it looked like an obvious success. The only problem would be the sheer amount of additional work this method introduces. I'd have to spray paint trays of coins, wait for them to dry, then arrange them in some kind of jig to position them for the laser, then clear coat all of them to ensure that the rest of the paint doesn't chip off.

I have no problem doing work. But remember that part at the very beginning of this story, when I said nobody asked me to do these? By now, this project was more than just a mind-clearing time waste, but there's no way I'm going to generate that much additional labor. There's got to be a simpler way.

Continued in part 3. You might as well read it, you've already come this far.

The LVL UP MakerCoin fiasco (turned out great) (part 1)

You know how sometimes, there's this really big project that you just don't want to work on, so you come up with a little side project to work on instead? That's how this all started.

I was working on a 3D design for a LVL UP trophy. Had I ever designed a trophy? No, what an absurd question. Who designs trophies? Is there an official title? Trophologist? Trophiary? Tropher Grace? Tropher Grace is the correct answer now and always.

Anyway. Trophy. I'll get into the trophy project at a later date. For now, what's important to understand is that, at the time, the full extent of my 3D experience was 3D printing, not designing for 3D printing. Designing an 8-10 inch tall, completely original trophy was a daunting task. So, one day, both out of boredom and also in an attempt to sharpen my skills with a new design, I designed a quick maker coin.

Maker coins are a whole lot of things all at once. They're a solid benchmark print for new materials or new printers, they're great sample swatches to print in new filaments, they're often handed out at maker fairs and gathering as like a token instead of a business card, and, if you're really bored, you can talk to them. You can talk to most things if you're bored.

In roughly an hour, I banged out a pretty cool, simple LVL UP logo design.

Boom. Project complete. Pack it in. Back to the trophy. I did something nobody asked for, did a pretty good job, but now it's time to get back to work.

Okay. That's more coins. Sure, why not? I mean, they're fast prints. That's like... Only one or two days' worth of printing. But seriously, there's that trophy project that actually needs to get done on a deadline. 

Or, I guess I could print a basket to hold all even more coins. They need to go somewhere, and it's not like I could just get a small box and ALSO STOP PRINTING THESE COINS. That would be unreasonable.

But what does Shawn at LVL UP think of these coins I made? I HAVE NO IDEA, I FORGOT TO ASK.

Thankfully, Shawn was on board. He really latched onto the idea of handing out these coins instead of business cards. He said that it would be awesome if the website was printed on these somewhere. 

Most people would've asked for feedback and design approval long before printing a hundred plus coins. I did not do this. Now, I need to put a website on these things.

Not only was it too late to fix what had already been printed, but I found another issue in short order. The coins were rather small; 50mm across. The cutouts left only a middle "island" of about 30mm, with the logo eating up almost every bit of it, and a 3mm ring around the outside. Neither spot would allow me to put in 3D-printable and legible text. 

So at this point, it's either 100% back to the drawing board and start from scratch, find a miracle new technology, or tell Shawn it was impossible. I told Shawn that the only way I could think of to get tiny but legible text onto these things was with something like a laser engraver.

The next day, this showed up.

Continued in part 2.