vinylcutter
A year ago when I was learning to operate the vinyl cutter, i've made this sticker to stilish my laptop lid at FabLab Lisboa, it was a great challenge for mastering the shear and roll technique, with such small losse ends some edges disapered with every day backpacking, i like it more now.
The Unknown pleasures cover is such a nice image that i must continue this legacy with the vinylcutter, let's take this to another level. I've found this vector graphics in this site, rotate each line in Autocad to have some topography of the first representation of the pulsar signal. I know from past experience that is a mistake to loft it on Autocad, so i changed to Rhino 3D loft it and convert the surface into a t-spline topology. Now, I have this nice topography and the urges to convert it in a flexure paper with the vinylcutter. For the topographic flexure, i have to create the xy equidistant sections, lets go to grasshopper to make the contours and trim them in an uneaven pattern.
I needed to manualy sellect the top contours of each mountain peak (evaluate-slider-item) and decide when the mountain trails start, now offset this line one milimeter to create the trim paths that cut the xy uneavenly, red contour with red mountain trail, blue contour with blue mointain trail.
That was the plan, since my scratch disk stop working, the only pieces i have retrieved was a waffle contour that i , because i made the first my wallpaper and had made the files for a pressfit waffle of that topography
I tried the waffle on the vinylcutter with 1mm thick pvc sheet, and didn't cut all the thickness. the joins where made and i needed to scale the entire drawing in function of th material tickness, I tried with some thick paper, with 0,5mm joins, make the svg with a single joint line, 5 different settings ande the vinyl shread the joins or not cut all to the end.
pressfit costruction
I realy love the concept of giving structue to a boundary representation, the tutorial in digital toolbox is good but it will make the joints at the same plane (xy at the boundary centroid). I've made my own waffle logic that joins the sections at the dead center of every box intersection between the x and y extruded contours, i avoided the solid boleans intersections to make the algorithm faster.
Now i'm working on modular domes, and i've found paneling tools plug in for rhino very usefull, it unroll and name every edge, so you don't loose your puzzle next week i will design the joins and make a pressfit of this dome.
