Computer controlled cutting

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.

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

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