3. Computer-Controlled Cutting¶
Files¶
Vinyl Sticker¶
On Wenesday we were given our first assignment which was to create a vinyl sticker using the vinyl cutter. An important part of this project was that the sticker needed to be multicolored. To understand how to do this I went to Adam Stones documentation on vinyl stickers. What he did was first follow a tutorial on cuttle that showed him how to make a multi layer and multi color snowflake in cuttle. I didn’t want to do that since for my design I would be doing one layer just with diffrent colors. I then rembered that in middle school we learned how to divide an image into multiple parts by changing the bitmap. For my sticker I chose my favorite disney charecter Kronk. Hes from the movie Emperors New Groove and is objectivly the best disney charecter.
Going back to the bitmap, to make the sticker less difficult I cut down the number of colors to four so that it is still colorful but im also not spending 30 minutes loking for colors. Once that was done I was able to send the design to Silhouette Studio. Once it was there I made 4 copies of it and removed all other colors from each one except for the one specifed for each file.
This is what the sticker looked like after modifying it in CorrelDRAW. I didnt want to many colors so I wouldnt be spending to long making the sticker so the outlines become a bit werid on the bottom of the sticker.
This is the first part of the sticker and arguably the most important one since its what divides up the rest of the colors in the sticker.
The skin is also very imporant since it covers a majority of the sticker.
The yellow is a big part of the whold sticker and I wanted to make sure I got a good proportion of it included
This last part is just to added some needed contrast to the yellow aforementioned.
After that was all done I went over to select my colors and then cut them all to the same size. Sadly I wasnt able to find the right skin tone for kronk so he had to be white washed. Im still very upset about it while documenting. From thier I saved it to my drive and then went over to the vinyl cutter where I would open a file then put the coressponding color on the mat and then cut it. i repated this process for all 4 colors and then went back and removed the unessicary parts from all of them. To bring all parts of the sticker together I put transfer tape on the biggest part first which was the Silhouete and then pressed it onto the second largest part, the skin. The transfer tape is sticker then the surface the vinyl is on so when I picked up the transfer tape after pressing the silhouette to the skin vinyl the skin vinyl went up with the silhouette on the transfer tape. I then repeated this process with the yellow and blue parts of the sticker and then volia I had a decently looking mulitcolor vinyl. Its looks kindve off since when I was removing the unessicary parts on the black vinyl which was the hardest one the mouth moved slightly, I didnt notice it at the time so when I went to put it on the skin it was too late. I tried to move it but the mouth wouldnt move so I had to just live with it. Once again the replacing of skin tone also didnt help.
These are the colors I used for the sticker. Thier all around the same shape for easy assimilation and I cut them a bit more after just in case.
This is what the diffrent parts look like after being cut along with the excess parts being removed. I didnt take a photo right after they were cut since its hard to see any noticable diffrence. Also its very difficult to remove lots of not needed small parts of a sticker and this lead to a mistake that I dint notice until later. I reccomend going slow and using a pair of twezzers.
This is what all the leftovers from the sticker looked like. It shows how much needed to be removed from each color.
This is what all of then parts of the sticker look like put together placed on one sticker. The mouth is a bit off since I didnt notice it had moved when I removed a part from it.
Finally this is what it looks like on thw window of stickers that each fab student have made.
Group Work:¶
Charecterizing the Lazercutters Frequency, Speed, and Power - Cooper¶
For my part of the group work test the diffrent settings on the laser cutter I chose to cut through a piece of cardboard 30 times. 3 rows for each modified setting and 10 colums for intervals going up 10. How it would go is that the other two values would remain the same that they were when usally cutting through cardboard while the 3rd setting would be modified by a percentage inbetween 10 and 100 in jumps of 10. This is all inspired by the group work done last year but instead of stars I chose to do recatngles so it could be seen if the cut went all the way through since to do all 3 settings the file needed to be a vector one.
In CorrelDRAW I set up a row of 3 boxes in a column, from thier I copied and pasted it 10 times across the file. From thier I labeled each row with the setting and each column with the interval by 10. To distinguish the diffrent boxes on the lasercutting software I switched the color value of the boxes to RGB and then gave each setting one of the colors. For instance power was blue so the values when the speed was modified to 30 would be R: 0, G: 0, B: 30. This was very tedious but the only way that all 30 boxes could be differenciated since the only way the settings could be changed on the diffrent parts of the file on the laser cutter was by line point and then the color. Since all of the boxes already had to be hairline the next thing available was the color.
Once that was done I was able to go over to the lasercutter and start entering values. A slight issue I ran into was that when I grouped the hairline setting by color was that the RGB values while all difffent were all very off. For instance the example blue setting would have become R: 16, G; 31, B: 51. The one good thing is that all of the values were diffrent so all it took was looking at the small image on the setting modifer and comparing it to the file in CorrelDRAW. It took a while but it worked out in the end.
Heres part of the divided up boxes with the settings input into them.
Heres what the design looks post cut
Heres what the test looks like outside of the laser cutter and you can see the diffrence in speed effecting how far the cut was able to go thrugh, the frequnecy whiule not as visuale has a larger cut and the power effected if the cut happened.
Heres the back of the board.
Parametric Design Kit¶
The second part of individual work was to make and build a parametric construction kit. To try and understand how parametric design works I went to Teddy Warners documentation under the suggestion of a fellow fabber Noah Smith. On his documentation he talks about while in the sketch mode, under modify thier is parametrics. This allows the user to create a preset mesurment that can be used later as a parameter. In his documentation he gives the mesurments of things such as the cardboard width and the depth of the dividen in the shape. For mine I chose to make a decagon for its multiple sides having more versatiliy. To start I made one in the middle of the plane and then on the top of the shape found the midpoint. From thier I made a line around a 3rd of a way into the shape and then using the sketch dimension tool made it the preset width of the cardboard. From thier I used the circular mirror command to make the other 9 indents into the decagon. The idea behind having a set parameter in place is in the case that if a part of it fails thier is an easy way to fix it since the width is already set upon each of the sides as the template which can be modified in the parameters menu again. Finally I used the search then chmafer command to make bumps into the edges of the indents. This allows the cardboard to be compressed if need be in the case of a slight miscalculation in the width of the cardboard.
This is what the parameter menu looks like and shows the values that I added under user parameters
The design bellow is my decagon and the several mesurments listed. the 2.619 and the 3.179 is the chammfer while the 3.81 is the parametrically set width of the cardboard in cm
Once again in the parametric menu, but this time I ve changed the value of the cardboard width.
This shows the modifications mentioned and while not working entierly as planned can be seen effecting all of the values set as the width.
To cut the design on the laser cutter I had to make my sketch into a 2d vector model, to do that I went to file then export and then selected it as a DXF file. It should be noted that for future versions of Fusion this doesnt work.
Here is what the design looks like in CorelDRAW and with three more so that a design can be made in real life.
This is what the design looks cut.
Heres what the design looks put together and as you can see they have a strong intersect.