For CCC week, I decided I wanted to make a few different joinable pieces for my construction kit: a few simple ones as connectors, and also a stegasaurus shaped one.
A very simple joiner piece was a circle with 4 nooks. I made the diameter and joint width/depth parametric so that I could cut two different sizes and adjust the joint to fit well.
On my first try, I cut the circle joiner and a simple rectangle joiner with 2 nooks to join pieces together in a line. I quickly found out that I had set my circle diameter and rectangle length too small, as I didn't account for the depth of the joint for the two pieces that would be connected. I also adjusted the width of the joints parametrically, as our group found that a chamfered press-fit joint width of 3.4-3.6mm was most suitable for the cardboard thickness.
I wanted to make a silly shape for one of the kit blocks and decided to make a stegasaurus as this would allow me to make a piece with joints at multiple angles. Here you can see the original sketch on fusion. Practically every dimension is a parameter and it is also extremely constrained. I had to experiment with different constraints as I kept getting over-constrained errors so this helped me improve my sketching skills.
Here is the cad for the stegasaurus as well as how it looked once it was cut!
For the laser cutting process, we exported CAD files which were thinkly extruded sketches of the outlines to cut as dxfs. We then loaded them onto Corel Draw, which when printed, would load the design in a program that controlled the Universal Laser Cutter. I had a small issue with the laser cutter, which is that it processed splines from Fusion really poorly. Anthony made a quick fix by opening and re-exporting them from Solidworks and this fixed it!
I played around a little bit with the pieces themselves like legos and built a little stegasaurus car! It was fun to cut different shapes and with more time, I definitely would have made a few more dinosaur legos.
For the vinyl cutter, I cut a simple smiley from the internet, which quickly made its way onto my laptop. Using mods, we uploaded a png, then cut stickers on black decal.
