Concept
I love lying in the grass and reading a book or taking a nap (during the ~2 months of warm weather that we get in Boston yearly). It’s getting pretty cold out, so what better way to fantasize about spring that to make something to enhance one of my favorite summer pastimes.
I present to you the Cocoon. It’s a collapsible structure that you can throw in the back of your car to bring to the beach or park. Once you get there, you can set it up, slide in, and pull the canopy over your head. It’s kind of like a portable, more stable blanket fort!
I want to focus on the fabricated part, so my electronics component will be simple- just an array of LEDs that can simulate “stars” in the evening time in the canopy fabric. I’ll only do a proof of concept for this due to scale.
Fabrication
The main structural components of the Cocoon are two parallel “arms” that can fold into an polygon-ish shape for storage. These arms will be made completely out of 2D CNC machined pieces (a la the “Make Something Big” assignment). The funnest part of this is designing the rotating joints.
I spent a lot of time designing this in Rhino (again, it would behoove me to learn some solidworks for the sake of simulations, I wish I had the time…) and using extruded parts to virtually mimic how the joints would work. Here’s the design breakdown.
For the sake of not wasting wood, I prototyped a scaled down version using ?” laser cut stock. After a few adjustments I got it to work!
Now it was time to scale up. By the time I was ready to mill out of ˝” plywood, however, the Onsrud was booked until next semester. I UROP in the IDC and have basic training on the machines there, so I decided to use the shopbot there.
The IDC shopbot is VERY hands on compared to the architecture machines. You do pretty much everything by yourself, which I actually really appreciated. After cutting three boards-worth of parts, I now feel super comfortable running the machine on my own and setting up files in PartWorks and VCut! See here for a little writeup on using the IDC shopbot.
Once all my pieces were cut and removed from the board, I needed to sand down the tabs and arrange the parts before gluing.
Gluing went pretty smoothly! Many splinters and much clamping later, I had my arms!
The base I made was actually the wrong size (sigh) so I had to use string to hold the arms the correct length apart. Also, I had to widen the holes for the dowels (which locked the arm in straight position) so they could go in smoothly.
I then made the canopy, and after some adjustments with string and whatnot I had my cocoon!
The fabrication took up most of my week (from redesigning, to scaling up, to the millions of problems with the shopbot and learning new software and a new machine, to cutting and sanding, and gluing, and assembly, plus being sick which made things go even slower). I’m not sure if I could have sped up the process, but starting earlier on the large scale fabrication would have been helpful. Alas, I ran out of time and didn’t get to the electronic component- which is sad because I was excited for my starry canopy!
