18. Wildcard week¶
This Weeks’ Task:¶
- Design and produce something with a digital fabrication process (incorporating computer-aided design and manufacturing) not covered in another assignment, documenting the requirements that your assignment meets, and including everything necessary to reproduce it. Possibilities include (but are not limited to) composites, textiles, biotechnology, robotics, folding, and cooking.
As for the wild card assignment, I thought it would be interesting to explore a geometrical net creator software called pepakura. It was mainly designed to aid paper crafts where objects can be unfolded to a flat template printable on paper and then glued and assembled. It enables the designer to create one piece geometrical objects which may even create new opportunities for lightweight product packaging and possibly flexible furniture design.
Initially, a low poly mug design was attempted in Rhinoceros 3D. The first steps involved drawing regular polygons then offsetting them at higher levels.
Below are process images of plan and elevation view.
Different variations were created and tested by altering the widths of the polygons(wider/narrower) as well as varying the rotation of the polygons by 30 degrees, followed by the loft command to create a 3D object.
However, most design variations proved to be unsuccessful when importing into pepakura, since the program created too many tiny nets that had to be stuck together instead of one-two large ones.
The final object design was done in pepakura. The same concept of a low poly design was used where I used an octagonal, cylindrical object and manipulated the massing several times to obtain a simple, low poly structure that pepakura software could translate it to one to two net template.
I exported the file as dxf format so that I can edit it in inkscape. Here I just changed the colour of the lines in order to prepare it for laser cutting. I had to colour map is in order for the laser cutter to understand where to cut and where to groove. The black lines represent cutting and the red lines represent grooving. I also changed the line thickness to 0.001 inches since this is what is used for laser cutting.
The laser cut settings used were:
The structural material chosen is chart paper and so I referred to the matboard settings since it is the closest material to paper. We adjusted the settings bu trying to laser cut the chart paper several times and finding the optimum settings for it.
The settings used were:
After laser cutting, I used an animation provided by Pepakura which guides the user in building and folding the net structure. I assembled the model together by using a glue stick.
The two videos below shows the process of how I did it.
The next step was to coat the model with epoxy to create a solid hard object. I roughly took a total amount of 20g to prepare the epoxy, in which I had to used (6g) 30% of hardener and (14g) 70% of resin. After mixing the resin, a red dye was added, poured over the paper and left to harden for a day.
6g of hardener
14g of resin
Red dye added
This is the final image and video of the model.
The images below shows the safety data sheet of the epoxy.
