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“Burning patterns into stuff with the focused suns rays…. about the level of eighth grade earth science before this subject was eliminated by our current Secretary of Education. But what if instead of just killing small arthropods with a death ray and then seeing spots before your eyes for ten minutes you could neatly carve beautiful figures with a solar Etch a Sketch. Controlling the Sun can be done with either moving the beam with a servo-motor mirror system or moving the target. The utility of Laser cutters and CNC machines is demonstrated nearly everywhere—you just need a lot of cash or a nearby well stocked Maker Space to participate in this blooming culture, or do you? The sun is free and the tools to carve into blocks of frozen yogurt or crackers or chunks of wood are easy to obtain from China or Adafruit. This project was done as another instrument to use at Burning Man—the ubiquitous sun, its portability and you can run it for the whole week on a car battery! The output is a little limited—for simplicity sake I designed it to do angles and straight lines but you could jazz it up for circles and curves.”

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