Computer Aid Cutting

In this week's practice, I have first characterize my lasercutter's parameters and then design, laser-cut, and document my Dog-feeder-box. Besides I have also cut some stickers for my T-shirt and tool box.

Result assembly of cut materials last week

This assembled box was cutted for my mid-term project 'Dog-feeder'.

Introducing Laser Cutter

The laser cutter we used this week is ARGUS made by Wuhan Sunic Photoelectricity Equipment Manufacture Co.Ltd with 200W of output power.

The laser cutter software is RDWorksV8. The cutter may read AI\BMP\GIF\JPEG\PCX\TGA \CDR\DWG\TIFF\PLT\DXF files.

The power of laser beam and air exhaust are separately controlled by these two buttons.

The configration setting of the machine and the plane movement of the laser head is controlled using a pannel.

The vertical movement of cutting bed is controlled with a button on the frame.

The material used for cutting exercise is wood boards with 4.42mm thickness.

Test cutting

In this part we design a demo grapgh which can check the cutting result of 2 most important vaiable parameter of the cutter (power and speed). The cutting power applied are 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%. The cutting speed applied are 20mm/s, 30mm/s, 40mm/s, 50mm/s. The line color on the graph were change to meet the laser cutter software's requirment. Different line color represent differen cutting power and speed.

Then download to machine and process.

We get the following result. (Where Y represent successful cutting, N represent unsuccessful cutting)

Power\Speed	20mm/s	30mm/s	40mm/s	50mm/s
20%	Y	N	N	N
30%	Y	Y	N	N
40%	Y	Y	Y	N
50%	Y	Y	Y	Y
60%	Y	Y	Y	Y

Besides we have tested the kerf (the diameter of laser). We cutted 10 rectange pieces for measuring the kerf and the designed width of each rectange is 2mm.

So the diameter of the laser beam can be calculated as kerf=(20-18.32)/10=0.168mm

Formal cutting

Before final cutting the kerf value was added as a parametric value into the previous Week2 design.

The 3D design in Week2 was convert to 2D drawings and load to the software.

In formal cutting process we use 40% power with 40mm/s speed.

The cutted pieces are collected after exhaust air is completely removed.

Design and cutting a construction kit

I have also designed a very simple construction kit and cutted it with laser cutter. Firstly using Fusion360 to draw the 2D drawing of my construction kit.

Then using pattern command to generate more of it.

The final drawing should be save as .dxf file for cutting.

This time I have used Acrylic to produce my kit.

There is thin film cover on the cutted result which needs to be peal off when use.

The final result is shown as below.

Vinyl Cutter Assignment

Prepare a 2D design for vinyl cutting. I have used Photoshop to make a logo design for vinyl cutting.

Then this logo is save to .bmp file.

The .bmp file can be imported to the CutStudio software for further editing.

The outline of the logo can be simply extracted using command as below.

It should be noted that the outline of the words in logo is very rough and it is very hard to be adjusted in CutStudio in detail. So I have typed those words again.