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As a Biological Engineer, I'm not familiar with making a website using HTML, let alone knowing what git and version control meant prior to the first week of HTMAA. Still, I wanted to challenge myself in building a website from scratch! I used tutorials from w3schools to make a general structure of a website, but I hope to improve upon the design throughout the semester. :)

I always wanted to put stickers on my laptop, but I didn't wish the decoration to look messy. Therefore, I took this vinyl cutting opportunity to make a sticker for myself that nicely blends in with my computer color: black. While surfing the internet, I found a cute panda image (as shown above). With a force of 67g, the vinyl cut was made on the white sheet. Then, using the transfer tape, I attached the sticker to my laptop!

1. 2cm x 2cm square (parameterized as "piece_side")
2. 2 finger joints on each side (parameterized "( piece_side / 4 ) + 2 * tolerance")
• tolerance was found to be ~0.127 mm (refer to week 1 group page)
3. hole and knob has same diameter = 8 mm (parameterized as "knob_diameter")
4. thickness of the cardboard was used for the finger joints = 3.65 mm (parameterized as "thickness_joint" that already includes the tolerance)

Although I wasn't familiar with using AutoDesk Fusion 360, I was excited to learn about this software for my 3D design! Referencing my hand-drawn sketch, I first began by making a large square (4*piece_side = 80mm). Then, I used a rectangular pattern to make 16 smaller squares. Similarly, I first made one finger joint and then used both rectangular and circular patterns to surround the face with a total of 32 joints. While I wanted to functionally parameterize the puzzle knobs and holes, as a beginner, this was much more difficult than I anticipated. (Thanks to my TA Alfonso, I could understand how I can parameterize knobs/holes, but I wasn't able to pursue this new approach due to the time constraint). Then I extruded the sketch using the cardboard thickness and projected the piece to acquire a clean sketch of each piece.

Now, I underwent multiple trials and errors to laser-cut my CAD sketch. When I tried laser cutting the sketch of the figure above, I realized that each adjacent piece duplicated the cutting process, potentially resulting in a fire hazard (this also slowed the laser cutting process). Thus, I separated each piece (as shown below). Moreover, I initially forgot to account for the laser kerf (~0.06m) for both the joints and the knobs. Instead of changing both protruded and caved joints by 0.06m (likewise for knobs and holes), I just altered the protruded joint and knobs to increase by 0.0127m, more efficiently changing my offset parameters.

The laser cutting process was relatively simple. After aligning the z distance, I used a power of 95% and a speed of 20%, which was found with my group. At first, I only laser cut 2 pieces to confirm the right dimension/ fit of the pieces. Then, I printed all 6 sides at once with a cutting time of approximately 11 minutes.

The construction took way longer than I expected. Although each piece's knob fits perfectly into the hole, since the cube was 3-dimensional, they kept falling apart. Until the last 2 pieces, I was able to build the cube. However, I realized that I needed a flat structure to prevent puzzle pieces from falling into/out of the cube, so tape was inserted to prevent mass damage to the structure.