I want to make a kit that can be used to make a dodecahedron. This might be slightly hard because the laser cutter can only cut at a 90° angle, so making angled slots where the pieces connect could be difficult. The solution that springs to mind is to maske the joints interlaced, so there is one degree of freedom.

Fusion 360 or FreeCad? On a whim I choose FreeCad..... And I then opened it and saw the design and promptly changed my mind. The UI is slightly configurable. Resizing the icons was a definite improvement. But still FreeCad is kinda brutal. I feel like half the time it doesn't work because I don't know what I'm doing (which is fair) but the other half the time it just crashes arbitrarily or like won't let me delete something that I selected.

So I switched to Fusion 360 and that made everything a slightly easier.

My first attempt at laser cutting pieces ended up producing things that were way too small. I had the units wrong. It took my a while to figure out the sizing.

_{Export as a .dxffile in order to laser print.}

I tried to use some of the more 'advanced' features of Fusion 360 like the rectangular pattern tool and mirroring my design across a central axis. I added more parameters but after a while it felt like my design became very fragile. I assume there is a workflow to view and manage constraints that I haven't discovered.

Continued the next day and things started working much better. I decided to rein in my ambition and model a more basic component first. I rebuilt the CAD model from scratch and finalized the construction kit design. There are three different types.

You can make lots of cool things with simple shapes.

_{Remember to start mod server so that printer can be found!}

I cut out a drawing that I made and turned it into a sticker. Weeding is more time consuming than I anticipated, especially for designs with lots of negative space. I found that holding the vinyl against a curved surface made this process much easier.