A PhD student had a frustrating day at work so he decided to make himself feel better by giving his laptop a makeover.
Sam Nicholls, of Aberystwyth University, thought his Dell XPS 13 needed a fresh new look so he enlisted the help of his buddy Tom to make his £1,149 laptop look like Cosima Niehaus’s from Orphan Black by etching its surface with a laser cutter (yes, that’s right).
You’re probably thinking this sounds a bit crazy, but here’s how it went:
First, the pre-surgery laptop was placed on top of a makeshift jig. In case you’re wondering, a jig – made up of a large piece of acrylic fixed into place with green tape – was created to help keep the laptop firmly in place during lasing.
Then, the measurements of the laptop were taken and mapped out on Lasercut 5.3 (a design software for laser cutting), taking into account the circular Dell logo.
The acrylic was cut to create the jig.
Then, the piece inside was taken out and measured against the laptop to double check the measurements were accurate…
… leaving a rectangular-shaped gap for the laptop to slot in.
An image of Cosima’s laptop skin (Nicholls admitted he used one of the photos readily available via Google Images) was rendered on Lasercut and converted to greyscale to get rid of the colours.
A test was then done on the acrylic to double check the jig was in the right location.
After that, the laser was tested on the back of the laptop to get a feel of how the cutting looked and whether adjustments were needed.
Then suddenly, Nicholls had a brainwave and decided to do more testing on the inside of the battery flap so the laser marks would remain hidden. He then decreased the power of the 60W laser to about 20-25% to finally get the strength he was looking for.
With everything in place, Nicholls instructed Lasercut “do its thing”, which then uploaded 8MB of instructions to the laser.
Only then, Nicholls realised the lid of his XPS 13 was slanted, so he used props to straighten the surface.
He then took a photo of the laptop ready for its treatment.
Then as the laser started doing its work, Nicholls found himself screaming internally as the fate of his laptop lay in the hands of another machine.
But soon enough, his vision started coming to life.
And voila! After an hour of nervous anticipation, the laptop turned into a magnificent work of art.
Looks pretty similar to Cosima’s laptop, doesn’t it?
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In case you are wondering why Nicholls didn’t go for coloured etchings, he explains: “I think ideally in future we’d do those steps ourselves to get more control over how colours are mapped to dot density, but this looked good enough for me.”
He later wrote in his blog: “Although I had faith that this wouldn’t be a disaster (despite my screaming while pressing the Start button), but I’m actually pretty surprised with the quality of the result, which was beyond my expectations.”
We bet Cosima, too, would be pretty impressed with the DIY effort.
