Softwares Used

• Fusion 360
• RDWorks

Safety Instructions

• Make sure all the experiments performed are under the supervision of the lab instructor.
• Read the instruction manual.
• Where necessary safety equipment.
• Have full concentration on the performing operations.
• Stay near the laser cutter while cutting or performing an operation.
• Do not cross the red line while on an ongoing process.

Construction Kit

For this weeks assignment I had to design a construction kit and for that I first tried to search over the internet what people have done.
I even had took a peak at my fellow classmates who were doing something of their own. I was not a creative guys so I thought of keeping the construction kit made up of simple shapesbr First I tried out Four shpars evnetually that failed then I went with only two. A square and a circle this allowed me to build something of a sorts cirles could act as wheels and bases and squares could act as a structure.
Then I chose is sizes arbitarily through trial and error through my failures I learnt that a there is no perfect size and its the perception of our thinking that appreciates it.
In my failure section I have some photos of a triangle, square etc. There I was able to find out that the size of the shapes or building block could tbe smaller this means that we could save cardboard by altering the size to few millimeters.
Through my success I intend to show that a press-fit construction if done perfectly could give a nice build.

Designing in Fusion 360

Parametric Design

Parametric design is just used to make a design alot more dynamic. It is one of those key feature in CAD / CAM softwares that enables designer,architects,engineers to build 3D model very easily.
Parametric design simply means that instead of some arbitary value to be set on a design we are going to assign different parameters eg:- Thickness, Height, Width etc.
In Fusion 360 its very easy to set paramentric design fuctions. We could define a function and give in some values later these values could change over time to adjust the design.
To set parametric values in fusion goto the Modify tab at the toolbar and click Change parameters.
You could set different parameters like length, kerf, thickness etc.
The most important use this feature is in CNC machining where the thickness of a material decides the slot height.
Example :- Thickness of Plywood even though the rated thickness of plywood is 12mm it could range from 10.5mm to 12.5mm to account for this thickness we use parameteric design. These could be defined as parameters and then be given as arbitary value.
Eventually the design also adjusts according to the changes values.

Kerf

It is the material removed by the cutting tool.
The image below also shows the kerf set in the design.

Failures

The Cardboard was uneven in thickness but couldn't get the press fits right.
Below is an image showing a press fit of different shapes with slot measurements in paramentric design.

Success

Finally I built a construction kit It was very small and two shapes this configuration gave me a bit of ease while cutting the cardboard since I had to only cut out two shapes with multi quantities.
So Using the construction kit I created a bike that resembles a space pod from the tron series.
The image shows a prper press-fit construction of my work that is.

Below You can see the in the image of a bike from tron series.

Later I created a directional arrow sign so that it could be used to point to something.

Some other pictures of the construction kit.

Vinyl Cutter

A machine which is used to cut vinyl paper into different shapes or pieces is known as a vinyl cutter.
Roland is one of the manufacturer of vinyl cutter. At our lab the Roland CAMM-1 CX24 is used to cut vinyl to create different types of stickers.
It has many different parts that didn’t capture my attention so I’ll be inserting a manual of the same.

A page of the User mannual of the vinyl cutter.

The link to download the user mannual is here.

Cutting Something on Vinyl Cutter

As the part of the assignment we were asked to cut something on a vinyl cutter. I decided to make a custom sticker for my laptop cover in the process. It was fun! and eventually learnt how to use the cutter correctly and got a brief walkthrough of mods also.

To create this sticker first I opened Inkscape and created a design as shown below.

I will be linking the tutorial for creating this design to the previous week for accessing that do checkout here.
Open Mods (which was was installed in Ubuntu)

Choose the png Image in “Read PNG”
Then click “calculate” at the top.
The open the teminal and use $dmesg command to check the usb driver for the Vinyl cutter.
Enter the USB driver name into the web socket section check the socket address.
And click send to printer.
The design will be cut if the vinyl cutting machine is set.