Assignment 3

5. By pressing the button I send the in visicut defined job to the laser cutter.

9. After cutting all parts assembling started. It was exciting to test if the joints would fit. As mentioned the first cut object was suitable and I was able to assemble all parts smoothly.

Christmas Tree

1. My second object was only designed with the tool OpenSCAD. This way I am able to change the height and width of my tree very flexible and I can laser cut a whole forest =). The tree itself consists of a lower and an upper part. Each has got a long joint in the middle (upper: lower joint; lower: upper joint). Additionally, the model includes a stand in which the tree can be fitted to make it steady.

• For the tree itself I wrote my own method 'module tree()'. In this I defined triangles that are modified with the 'translate' function to form the desired tree. Using the 'difference' function again I modelled the joints to be able to link the two christmas tree flat parts that form a 3D tree.
  
  

          
  length = 10;
  width = 10;
  a = 0;
  b = 30;
  c = 0;
  d = 10;
  inside = 5;
  widthSquare = 10;
  lengthSquare = 20;
  
  module tree(){
      translate ([a,0*b,c]) {polygon(points=[[0,0],[-4*length,0],[0,5*width]], paths=[[0,1,2]]);}
      translate ([a,1*b,c]) {polygon(points=[[0,0],[-3*length,0],[0,5*width]], paths=[[0,1,2]]);}
      translate ([a,2*b,c]) {polygon(points=[[0,0],[-2*length,0],[0,4*width]], paths=[[0,1,2]]);}
  
  
      translate ([a,0*b,c]) {polygon(points=[[0,0],[4*length,0],[0,5*width]], paths=[[0,1,2]]);}
      translate ([a,1*b,c]) {polygon(points=[[0,0],[3*length,0],[0,5*width]], paths=[[0,1,2]]);}
      translate ([a,2*b,c]) {polygon(points=[[0,0],[2*length,0],[0,4*width]], paths=[[0,1,2]]);}
      translate ([a,-0.5*c,c]) square([widthSquare, lengthSquare], true);
  }
  
  difference(){
      tree();
      translate ([0, 70,0]) square([1, 70], true);
  }
          
          

• The code for the stand of the tree basically was just designed with the 'difference' function by substracting two sqaures form a circle.

2. This time estimating the size of the joints did not work in the first place. For the stand part of the tree I had to do two iterations until my tree was able to fit into the stand.

4. By pressing the button I send the in visicut defined job to the laser cutter. I misaligned the tree once as I miscalculated where the tree was cut. Therefore, I had to cut the stand a second time.

7. After cutting all parts assembling started. Again an exciting step to see if the joints would fit. As mentioned I had to cut the stand a second time to make it fit properly.

Vinylcutter

General information

The vinylcutter is a computer-controlled plotting device with a blade instead of a pen and cuts the outline of a shape or letters into a sheet or piece of vinyl (self-adhesive plastic). At our FabLab we use a Silhouette Cameo 3 and also use the software Silhouette Studio. We have three different blades for this vinylcutter but the 'Auto-blade' works well enough for producing e.g. laptop stickers. The Silhouette Cameo can either be connected via bluetooth or USB with the machine that runs the studio software.

I decided to design a cool and personal laptop sticker that can be cut be the vinylcutter. So now one could ever steal my laptop secretly =P.

1. First of all, I downloaded the software and installed it on my laptop.

2. Now the design of my laptop sticker started. I wanted to have a sticker connected to my hobby volleyball. To design a volleyball as a sticker I had a look at the website 'Pinterest' and soon I found a good idea for underlining how I value volleyball. I did not like the font of the sticker. Therefore, I designed the three letters in another font as seen on the right underneath. The volleyball of the Pinterest website I liked a lot. So I decided to use it for my sticker.

4. Next, I prepared the vinyl. Therefore, I cut a part with suitable dimensions for my sticker on put it on the sticky underlay for the vinylcutter. This underlay assures that the vinyl does not move around during cutting. Afterwards, the underlay with the vinyl is put into the cutter. Underneath in the left picture you see the prepared vinyl and in the right you see me pressing the 'Load' button (located on the interface on the right of the cutter) which tapers the material. Now the material is prepared completely.

Attached files: