This week, I learned how to make a press-fit kit, create a website, and cut vinyl stickers. It was a great intro to the class, but I'm starting to realize that's it's going to be a LOT of work. I need to improve my time-management skills so I'm not up late working the night before! Overall, it was quite fun, and I'm happy with what I was able to make.
For the group assignment, we tested out different powers and speeds for the laser cutter. Then we experimented with the kerfs. I didn't have the foresight to take pictures, but luckily my teammates did. The below pictures are courtesy of Xin.
After some brainstorming, I decided to make a lamp shade of sorts for my room. So I made my own .dxf files using Autodesk Fusion. The three notable pieces are the edges (of different lenghts so the lamp design is modular), vertical connectors for the levels of the lamp, and corner connectors. The idea is that many geometric shapes can be made. I made the thickness of the cardboard part of my parametric design, although I did it for each part separately, so still had to modify multiples times. Annoying.
However, I had messed up some a shape in the Corel software, which caused a vector to be traced 4 times. This repetition resulted in a FIRE! Some of my pieces got burnt and I had to do it again.
After the re-do, I had a lot of pieces to put together. The press-fit wasn't as snug as I'd hoped, and the lamp shade turned out more haphazardous than I'd planned, but I had enough patience to try out two variations. It looks pretty cool when hung up!
For this, I just chose a vector image that I liked of gears. When I tried to use MODs however, I couldn't connect to the printer. I almost gave up, but Ben, a labmate came to the rescue with his advanced computer magic skills and got it to work. I still don't know what he did (EDIT: I tried to vinyl cut later in the semester, but MODs still has this problem). The cutting was good, but I wasn't good at taking it off. The sticker was too big for my laptop (which already had a lot of stickers anyway), so I took it home to put on my mirror. And then promptly lost it. Whoops.
I planned to use Jekyll, and got it set up, but couldn't find a template I liked. I actually spent the next few weeks finding one I liked (I can't help that I'm picky!), and ended up just copying the html and css source code from Grace Copplestone's website. (EDIT: The fonts and styling are from Google apparently, but I've done everything else from scratch, making sure I learned how to write good (or at least decent) HTML).