“Brainwave Sofa”

It’s either the ultimate in couch comfort or a totally bizarre idea dreamed up by a pair of designers obsessed with neuroscience. Either way, the “Brainwave Sofa” is clearly a one-of-a-kind piece of furniture.

The couch’s lumpy, bumpy shape is a three-dimensional version of a brain scan, specifically a three-second recording of designer Lucas Maassen’s alpha brain waves as he closed his eyes and thought of the word “comfort.” Data from the electroencephalograph was processed by BioExplorer, a 3-D visualization program, and then fed directly into a milling machine that cut the shape out of soft foam.

“The process is a wink to a rather futuristic design process,” the couch creators wrote in a press release, “for which a designer merely has to close his or her eyes, or merely rest, to have the brain do all the work, and create the data needed to have the CNC machine cut the shape of the sofa.”

The x-axis of the couch represents Maassen’s brain waves in hertz, while the y-axis shows the amount of alpha activity as a percentage, and the z-axis is the time in milliseconds. Once the foam core of the sofa was completed, the designers covered it by hand in soft gray felt and decorated the valleys of the brain waves with buttons.

Great Carving !!!

Did a little test carving with the CNC router. About 6” diameter, in birch. The 3D model is just a sample included with the software. Carved with a 1/16” ballnose spiral router bit.

-- Gerry

Customised Acrylic Sign Boards

Global Solutions has expertise in manufacturing and supplying of a wide range of acrylic sign boards also known as ACP Boards with CNC router cut 12mm acrylic letters, which can be designed by our experts in various texts, colors and pictures as per the specifications laid down   by our clients.
Our designers can create the designs on acrylic sign boards as per the latest market trends, providing them an attractive look boosting the business image. We use super grade materials to manufacture Acrylic Sign Boards.
They are available alphabetic and numeric order. Our Acrylic Sign Boards are water and rust proof.

http://globalsolution.in

CNC Router : the benches

Its a clock !!!!

Based around a simple principal: throw something gooey at the wall, it splats, thus you get a form which happens to be tailored to hold a clock as well, SPLAT! clock also addresses  ongoing interest of treating materials as they may not normally be thought of as capable of being treated in such a way. This time, it's wood as plastic. Wood as plastic may be accomplished a few ways, but this one is directly tool related. the 3-axis CNC router  can generate as gooey of surface as you desire out of solid material. The material is layered poplar.

Puddle Duck Molds

 

The molds for the Puddle Duck were cut on a ShopBot CNC Router out of 3/4 MDF. Shown are one half of the molds, the mold for station 4 and the stem. The puddle duck is symmetrical so the molds for stations 1 &7, 2 & 6, 3 & 5 and the stems are the same. The clamping strips have been attached to the molds, so with a little sanding to clean up the edges the molds are ready to go. Clear packing tape will be put on the edges of the molds to keep the strips for sticking to them.

A shelf made on CNC Router

For a commercial space, a shelf made for a specific line of hair care products. Made as a display for one of each type of product. This was made using the CNC router.

Materials: MDF

Innovative use of CNC ‘digital joints'

 

Panels 02 & 03 by Paris based sebastien wierinck will be shown at salone Satellite with the 101pct Designed in Brussels selection. The interesting thing about this work that sets it apart from much of the flat pack furniture in the field is the use of CNC specific construction joints, rather than emulating standard joinery or basic slots.
As CNC cabinetry becomes more accessible we will see some otherwise impossible (or at least really really difficult) digital wood joints being shared on the web.

Flexible Stream, is sharing 50 digital wood joints including the actual files needed, along with a PDF of instructions, and examples of use, all under a Creative Commons, Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.

The digital wood joints were developed in the course of several years of reserch at the C…Lab of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, a project headed by Prof. Jochen Gros and Designer Friedrich Sulzer. The result of this research are 50 digital wood joints, devided into frame joints, board joints and carcass joints. These wood joints are meant to inspire you, so that you will experiment and use them for your projects or develop your own digital woodjoints. They provide each wood joint in various data formats. Download the complete package (49MB) and you get them all including a PDF-Guide and suggestions for use. Or download only 4 examples and seperatly the instructions for these examples.

Present a joint concept like this to your local cabinetmaker and they will either ask why, curse you or both.. Prof. Jochen Gros and co. are also keen to see your modifications and pictures of implementation.

Flexible Stream is a source for free Design. Professional designers (including Ronen Kadushin) are offering samples of their skills for your convenience. It is totally free! Please download the construction files without any charge to build or let built this product. Many production methods can be applied: Rapid manufacturing (Rapid Prototyping, 3D-Print), CNC supported Milling, laser cutting, water jet cutting. Some product though can be done just with a pair of scissors made from paper or made with a jigsaw using wood.

“Digital Carpentry & CNC Router Aesthetics”

In a recent article in Make Magazine Volume 11 entitled Router Aesthetics, Bruce Sterling discusses the current wave of designs that are emerging that come straight from the CNC router, without any pretense to represent traditional carpentry methods of construction. The honesty of construction being essential to realizing the design with its layered, slots and tabs being compared favorably to 8-bit game graphics. The 90’s fascination with the ‘blobject’ giving way to an edgier, planar design aesthetic.

Using the CNC in a pure way means thinking of it as a completely different tool to a panel saw, tenon saw, drill, spindle molder whatever and using it for what it is. We previously mentioned on the Ponoko blog the project by Flexible Stream, where they are sharing 50 digital wood joints including the actual files needed, along with a PDF of instructions, and examples of use, all under a Creative Commons, Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.

The fact Prof. Jochen Gros and Designer Friedrich Sulzer are sharing these techniques is another movement away from the pre-industrial concepts of keeping a trade secret, to stop outsiders/amateurs from making their own. Now as the CNC process becomes more accessible via 100k Garages and similar initiatives, sharing this information with ‘amateurs’ becomes all the more empowering. The aesthetic that is generated should quickly become more fractured and diverse, along with the complexity of construction techniques (and software) used.

I think this is one of the most exciting products of the democratization of the tools of design, diversity. If we want the same product aesthetic all around the western world we can go to Ikea.

If we want originality, diversity and innovation, let’s unleash the tools of manufacture.

oh yeah, is Bruce’s (C)lamp influenced by, or an influencer of Router Aesthetics??