At my workplace we have a small electronics workshop where students can get help with projects, borrow equipment, buy tools and order components. They wanted to make their physical space a little more visible with a sign that described what they are doing. Instead of electronics workshop they are know by the name ELAB for electronics laboratory.
DESIGN
After a small brainstorm with my colleagues I got the task to design something that would make people recognize the place only by looking at the sign. The outline of the letters was designed with our company font type. Some of my thoughts was that it should be colorful, 3D and physical with things the user can interact with.
The basis for each letter are made by sheets of MDF. The wall where they should hang had plenty of empty space so I wanted to maximize the size of each letter. The only problem was that the letter A was a bit wider compared to the other letters, so A defined the total size for the rest. The four letters was each converted from a SVG file into a DXF file and laser cut on our CNC Laser cutter. We talked about painting the MDF plate but dropped the idea since we wanted to finish it as fast as possible.
My idea was to decorate the letters a bit like The Circuit Board Coffee Table were old printed circuit boards was used to cover the wooden plate. Compared to cover a large rectangular area it took a little more puzzle skills to do the same with narrow, triangle and round areas. The interesting thing is that all most all of the e-waste that is used has been used at my workplace in some form. Judge the result for yourself.
MODULES OF EACH LETTER
Have a closer look at the pictures below to study what each letter consist of.
E: fan, LCD from an oscilloscope, pump laser controller front panel, PCI server network card, CPU, power supplies, diskette, LEGO NXT controller, soldering kit.
L: VGA KVM switch, fan controller, LCD control panel, PLC interface card, router, Altera DE2 board.
A: red warning lamp, control board from an analog video camera, CAN development kit, Analog Discovery Sharc developer kit.
B: RAM module, oscilloscope control board, 8 bit computer control board, Anchor Chips development board, Atmel STK500 programmer kit, home made perf board, Devkit 8000 ARM Cortec A8 evaluation kit, multimeter, Analog Devices control board.
Feel free to use my idea to design you own project or reach out to me if you want me to design some e-waste art.
FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
A future development for the sign could be to make it more interactive so a LCD could write different messages, a blinking LED, a button that would turn on and off a fan or a speaker making a random sound when a person is detected by a motion sensor.
