Assignment: Week03

COMPUTER-CONTROLLED CUTTING

The assignment this week was:

Cut something on the vinylcutter
Design, make, and document a parametric press-fit construction kit, accounting for the lasercutter kerf, which can be assembled in multiple ways

I started with the parametric press-fit construction kit.

Parametric press-fit construction kit

I first made an attempt at press-fit construction without it necessarily being parametric. For this I designed and lasercut two chess pieces, the King and Queen.

The design:

The pieces are designed to be cut in 3mm acrylic.

I did a test cut using some grey 3mm acrylic I had lying around. The result...

I tested the fit, which was loose. After some small changes to the design to account for the kerf, I did the final cut on clear 3mm Acrylic...

Finally, I got around to doing the parametric press-fit design.

The basic pieces in this kit are cubes with slots in the corners. The slots are where the cubes will be attached to each other.

Since this was a parametric design, I deided to use openscad to make the design. The result was...

The circled area shows the code responsible for the size of the slots.

A copy of this code can be found here.

In order for the design to be parametric, I had to ensure that a variable was used that corresponded to the material thickness and by extension the width of the slots. I therefore changed the slot generating part of the code from...

square([6,30]

to...

square([mat_width,5*mat_width]

thus introducing the variable mat_width which is the material thickness.

The final code ishere.

I then rendered the design and exported a .dxf file which I then imported to corel draw and then sent to the laser cutter.

I then cut the cubes on 5mm thick cardboard.

The result...

Vinyl Cutter

For this assignment, I decided to do something that had been pending for some time at the new lab;... door signs for some of the rooms, specifically the Manager's office and the Kitchen.

Before...

I designed the label in Coreldraw. I first created the text then extracted a an outline approximately 0.075mm or 0.003In (hairline in coreldraw) thick which I then proceeded to vinyl cut.

I had used the vinyl cutter before and already had the drivers installed so it did not present much of a problem to me. The drivers allow the vinyl cutter to be treated as a printer so vinyl cutting is as straightforward as printing.

Switching on the vinyl cutter...