CAD, Laser & Vinyl Cutting

This week is all about learning to design with CAD, and using laser cutter and vinyl cutter. My idea was to make a new lamp for my living room.

Midjourney for Inpiration

To brainstorm ideas for my lamp, I went straight ahead to Midjourney and got some interesting results that inspired my future designs:

Parametric Design

To retain the consistency across my joints, material widths, gaps, etc, I needed to master the parametric design.

Algorithmic Design

I wanted to randomize the sizes of the side planks to make it look more chaotic, so I mastered Fusion 360 API, and built my custom script:

Finally got what I wanted. Except it looked pretty terrible :C

I’ve never CADed before, so I ended up spending way too much time behind the desk learning Fusion. At that point, I ran out of time for the week, learning also a good lesson of spiral development. I later learned to use a laser cutter in Inputs and Outputs weeks of taking the class.

Cutting acrlyic

Vinyl cutting