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Ekanem okeke
htmaa fall 2023

week 1: website + lasercutting + vinylcutting


vinylcutting

I really love the generic Gatorade bottle (despite that it continually spills in my backpack; I should probably try to engineer a solution to that next). However, I think it's kind of an eyesore so I wanted to take this opportunity to decorate and make my water bottle look more presentable. After some quick sketches on paper and on my iPad (will add those later), I made a sketch in Adobe Illustrator as pictured below.
Illustrator File Screenshot
Illustrator File for the Vinyl Sticker
As a note, I was debating trying to make it such that the vinyl would only go on the blank spaces of the bottle but I faced two issues: a) the shape of the bottle is very irregular and b) the stroke weight would be really thin if I shrank the design any more. In hindsight and if I were to redesign it, I could have applied painter's tape to the bottle, traced the printable area, then peeled the tape off and then used that as a reference for the sizing. Nevertheless, I think even with the overlap I think it still looks pretty good. I ended up actually vinylcutting in Edgerton on a cricut. Cutting in Edgerton was especially nice because they had this fun reflective vinyl!
vinyl cutter setup
Vinylcutter setup
The cricut software was pretty easy to use, and the cut went off without a hitch!
cut vinyl
Cut vinyl
I used transfer vinyl to keep the general form together without trying to transfer the sticker manually.
transfering vinyl using transfer paper
Using transfer paper to transfer the vinyl onto the bottle
As I was cutting, I realized that my design is quite wasteful, so I decided to try to utilize what I had originally visualized as scraps and added them to the existing pattern. I did not use transfer paper though, so the vinyl did not stick on as well and I think some parts of it may peel off over the next couple of days/weeks. Overall it came out pretty cool! I've been showing my water bottle off to all my friends and I feel like I've improved on the initial product!
Water Bottle
Water Bottle
Final vinyl cut water bottle


lasercutting


I have been really into planning and considering room decor for my room over the past week, in particular for my desk. As such, I decided that this week I would make a laptop stand out of cardboard. Originally, I felt that this might have been too simple a job, so I decided to really lean into parametrizing the stand. I love CAD-ing with parameters as I just think that it's such a neat way to make your object easily change to fit different circumstances. Therefore, in this project I really wanted to test my skills in modeling parametrically by having the shape of the stand be parametric based on what angle you wanted your laptop to sit at, the height you wanted your laptop to sit at and the dimensions of the laptop. I originally was also trying to consider the footprint of the stand as a another design constraint, but ended up ignoring it in light of trying to perfect the parametric elements. The real issue with this CAD model idea was trying to solve how can you maintain a similar silhouette while stretching the model to different dimensions. I created the initial silhouette of the model off of vibes, so it included a lot of funky curves. I was originally hoping that recreating the drawing using circles and ellipses would negate any possible parametric issues but it didn't. I first tried just setting all of the dimensions in the x and y direction as being ratios based on one parameter in the x and y direction but the CAD kept breaking. I asked a HTMAA alum and CAD-ing god Alayah Hines for help and ended up realizing that due to the importance of maintaining the angle of the top line, there were a couple trigonometric relations at play that I would have to consider. All in all, I ended up running out of time and mostly abandoning making it parametric to the computer's size and just making it parametric to the size of the material and kerf. Nevertheless, it was a fun idea; I had no idea it would have been that hard to implement.
Lasercut CAD
CAD of the laptop stand
After moving on from the CAD and finally lasercutting, I realized that I forgot to add my kerf parameter, so the joints fit more snugly than ideal. Thankfully the cardboard was pretty forgiving, so after scraping at the joints a bit using an exacto knife I was able to fit the pieces together without them deforming too badly. Additionally, after just assembling those parts, I realized that the stand was incredibly flimsy and could barely support a feather. I considered different methods of adding support and stumbled upon the real benefit of using cardboard; it is also easily used for rapid prototyping using an exacto knife. As I saw another student's laser cutting, I realized the joints become a lot more secure when the pieces overlap a lot more. I quickly made an additional support for the base pieces using an exacto knife, and tested it out.
Rapid Prototype
Support cut with exacto knife
Once that worked, I added it to my CAD as shown above and cut the pieces out. It ended up actually being strong enough to support my laptop!
Finished Laptop Stand
Finished laptop stand

Group Assignment

For the group assignment I got together with other members of the architecture shop, and we lasercut Neil's sample file to see how the lasercutter cut when the laser was out of focus and whether/how it would cut depending on whether we changed the power and speed of the laser. Notably, it looked more burnt when the laser was out of focus, something to keep in mind as a possible failure mode in the future. We also took the time to arrange everything into the same laser cutting file, which was a bit annoying, but it was nice to know that you can run the laser on a bunch of different settings all within the same job.

website

I have such little and random coding experience and a very strong love for graphic design, so making a website was very difficult for me. It was very hard for me to keep my expectations realistic for this week while actually making something that would function as expected. I was also a bit impatient whilst reading through guides and examples, which made the experience even harder for me. However, one of the other students, Simon Lesina Debasi, really helped me to understand how the work on gitlab related to the website itself and essentially how to understand how the code on other people's websites related to what was shown on their website. I looked a lot at his and Charlie's websites to figure out how to write this! I have a lot of ambitions for making this website more interactive in the future, and I'm excited to implement them over the semester!