Group assignment

• Characterize your lasercutter's focus, power, speed, rate, kerf, joint clearance and types.
• Document your work to the group work page and reflect on your individual page what you learned.

group assignment

Individual assignments

• Design, lasercut, and document a parametric construction kit, accounting for the lasercutter kerf, which can be assembled in multiple ways.
• Cut something on the vinyl cutter.

Learning outcomes

• Demonstrate and describe parametric 2D modelling processes.
• Identify and explain processes involved in using the laser cutter.
• Develop, evaluate and construct a parametric construction kit.
• Identify and explain processes involved in using the vinyl cutter.

Lazer cutting

The lazer cutting process did not goes as planned since FreeCad is quite a handful at least to someone with as little experience as me.
This week I realised that I had an old version of Inkscape so I uninstalled it and upgraded!

This week I started by looking at this https://www.slideshare.net/openp2pdesign/fab-academy-2015-laser-cutting?ref=

I watched this amazing tutorial  that taught me the basics of parametric modeling in FreeCad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXoRAYv1wHQ

• Open spreadsheet
• Put in values for box (width, height, lenght, wall thickness, base thickness)
• Set alias for numeric value (top right corner)
• Properties-> set it to mm
• Body - sketch - select XY plane
• Make box, make it even, change value
  
• turn it from 2d to 3d
• set value
• AND BOOM U GOT A BOX

This is the box I made. It took hours but i am very proud. The awesome thing about this box is if you change the values  through the spreadsheet, it still keeps its shape and only changes what you ask to change! Very epic

While watching youtube tutorials I realised that FreeCad has a Laser Cutting workbench available for download! Down below is a video introducing it!

Designing my own construction pieces

I wanted to make pieces inspired by the Phantoms from Animal Jam. I began by drawing up potential versions on Inkscape :)



I then redrew one of the pieces up in Fusion 360

I struggled quite a  bit to get the parametric part to work. I looked at a lot of tutorials about Parameters in Fusion 360 but here is the one I followed for the parametric part of my design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntMBZQUTLNA&t=1700s


After a while of struggling I finally managed to get the parametrics to work without breaking when I changed the numbers too much!

Here is one example of a broken sketch from changing the numbers:



Here is the sketch:



Here is a quick rundown on how to change the parameters

1. First go to configure
2. Then click that little button
   
3. Select the parameters you want to configure
4. And finally change the numbers and watch your design change!
   

I saved the sketch as a DFX file and opened it in Inkscape.

I then began deleting unessecary lines and later set the colour on the remaining ones to red. The line thickness was set to 0.02mm.


After that I used ctrl+shift+R to resize the page to the selection.
Last step before the laser was to save the file as a pdf

 

epilog Laser

I then followed our laser's instructions

1. Turn on air conditioning + cooling system
2. Turnh on laser
3. Wait 20 seconds
4. Pointer
5. X/Y OFF
6. Go
7. Open lasercutter and put material in
8. Use the manual focus unit  ↑↓
9. Move to starting point
10. Set home
11. Close
12. File>Print>Properties
13. Change settings (as seen below)
14. 
15. Press print on the computer
16. Go
17. Wait 30 seconds
18. X/Y off
19. Go
20. Remove material
    
21. Turn laser off
22. Turn off Cooling and air conditioning

Here are the results:

I then assembled the puzzle pieces. I didnt manage to make anything look quite normal per se so these creations are rather abstract. I guess you could call it a modernistic surreal approach to this assignment. Due to the minimalistic features of this set,  it challenges the imagination of anyone who chooses to create something through the puzzle pieces I designed.

A day to remember - art piece

by  María Fönn Frostadóttir

Streetfighter

by  María Fönn Frostadóttir

The castle by the river

by  María Fönn Frostadóttir

Trapped

by  María Fönn Frostadóttir

Vinyl cutting

For the vinyl project I decided to use my band´s logo. Our logo was drawn through flipaclip and I used the screenshot of it and put it into Inkscape. I then used trace bitmap to put it into a Vector format. After that I used the node tool to remove unessecary details.

I used cut difference to make a gap in the N

I took the fill away from the image and made the lines red. The line size is always 0.02mm and red so the machine knows where to cut it.

Since we were making a few copies we lined the stickers up using tiles and mirrored the design