Mechanical Design Mar 30. 2016

This week we started to build a machine that does something  and includes an actuator.

Without thinking what we wanted to do, we started to build our mechanical parts buy cutting the linear  rails  from the provided Rhino models.
We first tried to use the dfx files and opening them with Inkscape but that did not work. Incscape did not recognize all the lines in the file and the design opened incomplete.
Next, we tried to produce pdf from Rhino since we did not have rhino in the PC connected to our laser cutter. That road was not successful either. The line width was not successfully set to the width that the laser would have understood as a line that needs to be cut or scored.

After that, I need to install the Epilog Fusion laser drivers to my laptop which has Rhino3D and make the printing from there. We still needed to figure out the scaling of the cuts which was solved by introducing a rectangular shape into the design. The size of the rectangular was the size of the bed of the Epilog Laser cutter (40”x28”). The layer that the shape was placed, was set to be no print. as shown below.

After that, it was easy to do cutting from Rhino. We used color mapping for red and blue colors. Since the different colors were on different layers, we did only one type of cut / one run; first score and then separation cut.

After doing one stage from cardboard, we decided to continue with plywood and redesign  the stages in Inkscape. Antti did the design. We were able to use the cardboard model as a reference for the measurements.

Files: None produced