After hearing that we'd be learning to use the vinyl cutter to make stickers, I immediately went to ask my friends what kind they wanted. As the nerds they are, they asked for stickers of their favorite games and movies (and more random stuff). They sent me pictures and (as I recovered from the frat-flu) I spun up PhotoShop to convert them into silhouettes, immediately running into issues with space constraints.

After clearing space, I started the process of converting the images to PNGs and turning them monochrome. One of a hardest challenges was keeping the detail, while also making sure that it seemed reasonable to print.

Initially, my final image was not resolving; I thought it was a bug and tried to print it out and got absolute trash. The image seemed very clear to me, so I was very confused why the processing pipeline on the printer could not identify the image. I eventually realized that I needed to change the threshold parameter in the the pipeline, because there were areas of grey in the image that were resulting in very weird shapes when converting into a cutout form. After updating the threshold, I hit print and got:

... still not great. Turns out that the details of this Todoro picture were too intricate to print at the size that I wanted for a sticker, so I moved onto my next request: a sans-serif sticker of the word:

Amazing. Revolutionary. And also it printed with no hassle, so at least I had a benchmark that proved that the machine was functional.

My final test with the vinyl cutter was my most complex, printing a silhouette of my friend's LoL main: Thresh. I have no idea who the dude is, but he looks cool. So I got to printing, using what I'd learned about preprocessing the image to create a clean image - I set the threshold correctly, set up the printer, and hit run. Only to realize that I didn't lock the vinyl in place:

Take two: I hit print, and it started going at it. And the end result was awesome! (just ignore the rip on the side, I got too excited and the vinyl I was peeling off from the first outside layer got stuck in a gooey wad and I had to rip the paper :")

Then, making sure to SHEAR and NOT pull the vinyl off, I pulled off the unnecessary parts with a tweezer with the precision of a trained surgeon. And it turned out even cooler!

My vinyl sticker was a success! So I moved onto the next part, working with the laser cutter to make something I've wanted to make for a while for my brother: a construction kit for a toy car roadway system. I started by making the simple designs for the constructable elements for the road, with different amounts of possible adjacent connections. I then moved onto the more complex designs, like the plus-intersection, which had 4 possible connections, and the T-intersection, which had 3 possible connections; I also made a "dead-end" piece, which had only one possible connection.

Once I designed the pieces, I moved onto the laser cutter. I started by making a test cut on a piece of cardboard, to make sure that the laser cutter and my design was working properly. Once I verified that the laser was focused, my design was being cut out properly, and there was no risk of setting the entire shop on fire, I moved onto printing all my parts.

Once I had all my pieces cut out, I moved onto the next step: assembling them. I went all out to see just how big of a road I could make, to see how it all looked. I'm really glad with how it turned out and I'm excited to see how my brother likes it!