Students gathered at the University of Connecticut’s Innovation Shop, located on the first floor of the Castleman building, to create Halloween pins and learn more about its facilities on Oct. 28.
The Innovation Shop is a 6,000 square foot space in Castleman. With the help of 3D printers, CNC mills, laser cutters and more, students can use this space to make their ideas into both experimental prototypes and fully formed creations.
The iShop is dressed up for the Halloween season. Pumpkins and skulls are littered throughout the space, horror-movie inspired posters were hung up which detail the perils of 3D printing errors and a hanging spider would periodically drop down to say hello behind the door of the iShop.
Once students got over the spooky spider, they had the opportunity to create Halloween pins using LED’s and laser-cut Halloween designs. First, students had to solder a battery pin onto an LED circuit. Soldering is the process of joining two or more metal items together with a filler metal, called solder; a way to “glue” two pieces of metal together. It was the trickiest part of the pin-making process, as students struggled with uniformly applying the solder across the pins, which left them with flimsy designs.
Once the battery pin is soldered to the LED circuit, students could choose one of the laser-cut designs made by the iShop staff to glue onto the front of the LED circuit, ranging from cats, ghosts and skulls, with a glue gun. Finally, glue a pin onto the back of the circuit and voila; you have a light-up Halloween pin for Halloweekend.
As a bonus, students could also get walnuts with scary faces laser-cut onto their shells, showcasing how one can cut a variety of materials with the iShop’s two laser cutters.
Anthony Beatty and Joseph Luciani were two members of the iShop staff present during the open house, who use their years of expertise as engineers to train budding engineers into using all the facilities the iShop has to offer.
When asked for the idea behind a Halloween open house, Beatty said “We did it last year… when we first started opening up the space and wanted to get more students to know what the space was about. The space has grown quite a bit since last year, more 3D printing, another laser cutter, just the layout of things has changed quite a bit.”
Luciani also hopes to introduce more freshmen engineers to the iShop.
“Last fall, we didn’t have access to all of the freshmen engineers, so now we had all [ENGR] 1166, currently having all of Engineering 1000 coming through the space. So, we’re slowly introducing the freshman class of 2025 to this new shop,” Luciani said.
The open house showcased the iShops soldering and laser cutting facilities because laser cutting a design was faster than 3D printing it, according to Beatty.
“Even though our space is mechanical, we do have a heavy electronics presence,” Beatty said. “We give a very basic idea of, you know, it’s difficult to solder, so students can come in and practice those skills as well as just basic crafting to make it more Halloween-esque. The crafting aspect of it just makes it a little bit more fun while learning a new skill.”
The laser-cut walnuts were a way to present a fun side of the engineering process; proof that you don’t need rigid designs to make something.
“I think it’s fun whenever you have projects that include multiple points of fabrication, so you have something that’s laser cut and then incorporate a circuit into,” Luciani added.
In terms of the future, the iShop hopes to conduct workshops in the future for students to learn how to use certain machines, like CNC mills or laser cutters, and skills, like soldering. Beatty hopes students come in to “rapidly [build] prototype stuff so that way students can get their hands in here and know what the space is, that gives us time to build up the rest of the space.”
Luciani concluded with “I think that’s one aspect we have in here, but also working on the community aspect of it, like how students rely on each other to learn the skills, and also for us to be able to offer workshops on how to learn these skills? These are all things me and Anthony [Beatty] are trying to put together so that we can create a process for you guys to make this place home and your shop.”