Equity Sticks
Instruction
A helpful tool for teachers to ensure all students have an equal opportunity to participate in class, equity sticks can be easily made with your xTool laser. You can use your laser to quickly build your own sticks or customize sticks you already have in the classroom.
The first step in this project is to build a template that matches a popsicle stick. Most are 4.5x0.4 inches with rounded edges. Recreating the rounded edges isn't very important, but I wanted to go ahead and do that for this project in case I needed to cut out sticks.
To build the template, let's start with a few basic shapes, a rectangle and two circles.
Set the diameter of the circles to 0.4 inches to match the width of the stick. Next, move the circles so that half overlaps the end of the rectangle. Next use the combine tool to Unite the two shapes.
Next, use the text tool to add in labels for the sticks. I am doing this one at a time, but you may want to create a template to do several sticks at once. I set the popsicle shape to 1% power and the score processing type. I don't want to mark the shape, but just use it as a guide.
The settings are for the D1 5W laser. You may need to adjust the settings for your laser configuration.
Be sure to follow all the safety guidelines for your laser and always wear personal protective equipment when the laser is in operation.
I have also included two extra tabs in the project file that has popsicle sticks to cut out, and another tab with a box. You may just want to engrave some popsicle sticks you have handy, but you can optionally build the entire project.