week 14: wildcard week

Prior Experience: ?/5

Wildcard week is lots of different things; I chose the Zund (a very precise cutting/scoring/whatever machine). I had not done anything on the Zund before, but earlier in the semester some people from origaMIT came in and Alfonso introduced the Zund to us, so I basically knew what it could do. Most of the skills necessary on my end are just CAD/design as usual, and Alfonso knows everything about the machine.

I signed up for the Zund on the wildcard week wiki: https://gitlab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.22/site/-/wikis/home

(Alfonso wanted to look at the dogs in the swimming pool)

In particular, I signed up for "Large Format Cutting, Folding, Creasing, Drawing, or Whatever You Can Think About." I can think about large (or not large) format folding. As Alfonso says,

the Zund is an incredible flexible and precise gantry machine, able to do anything you can put in the modules in 2.5 axis. It is composed in 3 modules in wich you can insert up to 3 tools in the same job. This machine has also a vision system that enables us to mill in the two faces of a material by using the roto-translation tool(means that it generate some coordination geometries that when flipped the sheet material, the machine itself will look at them and calculate the new X and Y axis that will mach the previous one) tool. Here in the lab, we have original modules but also hacked modules to do

• Multiple size and form Linear blades
• Punching (braille)
• Oscilating blades
• Many different creasing tools
• 50kRPM router
• Pencils

Seems epic to me. I went in for the training and listened to him talk about the machine, which he likes a lot. Basically, the Zund is a machine initially designed for industrial use in cutting fabric, but it can cut lots of different materials. It is super precise and can use a laser combined with registration marks to line up the cutting perfectly, even when the material is flipped over. Also, it is really fast, around 2.5 times faster than the shopbot. Moreover, it can switch out different "cutting modules" automatically, and it can be hacked to work with custom modules as well, such as braille or different textures. Also, it has a knife, an oscillating knife (like cutting bread), a scoring tool, very sharp blades, and more.

I should send my design file as a .dxf file.

Alfonso has this pretty epic material that is 1.2mm aluminum that can be folded, since it has some flexible material sandwiched between the pieces of aluminum, called Hilite. He has made cool metal origami sculptures out of it before:

I designed an origami crane that can fold out of aluminum.

I also wanted to cut a curved-crease origami with straight lines, like Alfonso showed, but didn't have time.

I exported them as .dxf files and sent them to Alfonso. It turns out that I actually didn't have to draw the lines on the crane thick (for this first iteration), since the machine already has a kerf of however large the endmill is, which I didn't consider properly. We also redrew the .dxf files so that we could have everything all in one file, and added a radius to the wings.

Then we cut:

Then, we folded!

We had to use a clamp to fold it all the way:

Here's the result:

We also tried to cut another one but the machine wasn't cutting very well for some reason.

We didn't have time to experiment since we had to go look at the dogs in the swimming pool, but hopefully can perfect this process at some point. Alfonso wants to make a bunch of cranes because they are cute and would make nice gifts :)