Week 0: CAD
For my first assignment, I decided to design a techno snowflake laser projector. The idea is to build a large snowflake that would rotate to the sound of techno music. The snowflake would be equipped with a set of lights and lasers that would put on a light show matching the beat of each track.
I designed the snowflake in Fusion 360. This was my first time working with a parametric design software; I learned a lot about the process. This assignment gave me the opportunity to better understand components, modular design, and parameter management. I also learned how to be efficient with my time and use patterns to reproduce my work.
I started by designing half of a branch of the snowflake. I used parameters to define the lenght of the branch, the lenght of each sub-branch, the distribution of sub-branches across each branch and their angle.
I then mirrored my work to design a full branch.
Using the branch design, I applied it to a circular pattern to build the entire snowflake. At this stage, the parametric nature of my design helped me edit my project; I was able to adjust the lenght of each sub-branh to make sure that they wouldn't intersect.
When I was happy with the sketch of the full flake, I extruded the design to make it three dimensional. To get to this result, another option would have been to extrude the simplest pattern and to multiply a pattern of the extruded form.
I then designed two new components: the lasers and the lights. I represented the lasers as circular intrusions into the flake and the lights as sperical extrusions. I designed a regular pattern portraying where they would be placed onto
