I tried to make a tiny city on a ring. It came out OK but I’m still figuring out what scale works with what materials. Also, balsa is useless; never use it for anything.

I have been using a program called QCAD to draw out the designs, and its been kinda frustrating. The documentation for it is terrible. Bre found a guy who does tutorials which has helped a little, but its overall a slow process. In some ways its similar to Rhino, which I learned in college, but the UI is totally different and its annoying. I’m debating whether to reinstall XP on my laptop (it has Ubuntu right now) just so I can use Illustrator instead. Because apparently I have forgotten how much I hate Illustrator.

I also made another ring, but the basswood was too weak for the design, and the notches were a tiny bit too small.

Three tries (took a while to get the scale right) and some tweezers later… TINYSAUR

Here’s tinysaur next to Bre’s dinosaur:

If you’d like to make your own Tinysaur but lack a 35 watt CO2 laser, you can get the pre-lased kit on Etsy or if you’d rather skip the tedium and just have a tiny T-Rex, you can get a completed Tinysaur as well.

And the board:

Here’s a photo of the prototype, taken by Eric Skiff:

Working on drawing a schematic / board that other folks can use, Adam is helping me with that part since I’ve never used Eagle before (or any other circuit CAD software for that matter).