HTMAAA Week 2 / Computer Controlled Cutting

Assignment

group assignment:

do your lab’s safety training
characterize your lasercutter’s focus, power, speed, rate,
- kerf, joint clearance and types

individual assignment:

cut something on the vinylcutter
design, lasercut, and document a parametric construction kit, accounting for the lasercutter kerf, which can be assembled in multiple ways, and for extra credit include elements that aren’t flat

Tools used

Laser Cutter, Vinyl Cutter

Laser Cutter

Group Assignment

Our group assignment was to measure and figure out the accuracy of how our cardboard joints can fit together.

Johnny was there to guide us through the process with his MechE knowledge, and we were baptized into the Church of Johnny.

We tested out various settings, and turns out that we missed the first time as we through the original kerf was around 0.1mm, but it was 0.2mm.

And turns out that the trial and error was crucial

This was the final parts of the experimentation, big props to Johnny for his help and guidance!!!

Final parts from all of the experimentation

Personal Assignment

For the personal assignment, I wanted to create a Noguchi Lamp, which is a lamp made by Isamu Noguchi.

I wanted to first make the lamp, but I was suprised at how Fusion360 was really manual, compared to the algorithmic wonder that is Rhino and Grasshopper. But I wanted to learn something new, so I decided to use Fusion360.

While creating the initial design of the lamp, I was making mistakes left and right, with only a few days left to make everything.

Then I remembered,

Maybe it might be better to just start small, or simple that I knew that I could make and go from there. So that led me to really start small and try to build up from there.

So really, the first thing I did was just sketch out the schematics of how big I wanted everything to be on really plain paper. It wasn’t really the prettiest thing, but it was a good start.

Then, I could build up from there.

So then I modeled my inital design, and started to use the laser cutter.

This is where the kerf tests from before came in handy. I was able to get the laser cutter to cut out my designs, while still upholding the structure of the lamp!

There was some failures because of the document position

The several other things I wanted to do with the lamp looked like this:

Lock down what kind of bulb I could stick into it (or really where to find something that would work)
Make it more organic looking
Put on some living hinge shades!

Updates:

I went to the office hour of the class, and was asking the TA technical questions about the living hinges (I couldn’t find good literature about how to make them algorithmically, or if there was a good way to do it).

His answer was that you shouldnt be thinking too hard about it and it would be better to just test out and try.

And that I did.

My woes were not done as I found out that the curvature of the cardboard was too much, and really messed with the accuracy of the laser cutting. It would just make everything slowly not cut and curve out!! So, I had to make things work more manually.

Hopefully, I decided to make it manually, and put some weight on the cardboard to help it stay in place. Double checked with the laser that it would not hit it, and checked its pathing so that it wouldnt collide.

Vinyl Cutter

The goal was to make a sticker that looked a bit like Johnny because he was so helpful during the laser cutting process and sharing his MechE knowledge with us.

But because the photo was too high res, and it would take days to cut it out and place it on something, we had to find out a way to make it lower res.

I used a tool called cutecutter , which was honestly amazing as it was very easy to use and had easy options to lower the resolution of the image.

It then gave me some parameters to play with, and I was able to get it to down to the right amount of abstraction that I needed. I wish it really just made all the parts into one part so that taking off of the cutter would be easier, but alas no.

Cutting it out was a bit of a pain, but it went out better than I expected. Note to myself in the future: Strong stick on the cutter really makes sure that it is strong stick!

I also helped a few people out with their logos. I used a tool called removebg for my friends who had white and black logos (which were mostly really MIT Media Lab logos), and it made it so that only the black part of the logo was left, which was perfect for the logo.