Professor Michael Robinson came into DaBL to make a new astrolabe. This is an ancient astronomical instrument used for time-telling and observation of the stars.

The majority of materials for this build were fabricated on the laser cutter. Professor Robinson used a custom Jupyter notebook to create a vector file containing appropriate calendar days and star charts that could be easily sent to the laser cutter's CAM software. One tricky part in making this was ensuring the acrylic stock was aligned so the laser cutter could imprint designs on both the front and back of the astrolabe pieces. Professor Robinson 3D printed a pointer and assembled the device using M3 screws

Read more about the process on Professor Robinson's blog. Additionally, the files to make this device are available on his GitHub.