Week 1

1. Group Assignment with Jonny & more

People come and go so it’s really hard to define our group, but it mainly consists of Kye, Toni, Jessica, Michelle, Cyrus, Hye Jun, Sophie, Jia Ming, and more…

We first cut a 50 mm square with no offset to measure the kerf of this laser cutter, and we’ve concluded that the kerf size is 0.2 mm, which meant all our other designs should have an offset of 0.1 mm. We then made a pair of combs with chamfer joints from 3.3 mm to 4.0 mm, increasing by a step of 0.05 mm on both side. After testing different slots, we figure that 3.7 mm works best for a press fit chamfer joint.

We then tested out different parameters for the raster cutting, making a 3x3 matirx changing speed from 25, 50, to 75, and changing the power from 100, 75, to 50. The matrix showed nicely that at the upper-left corner with speed 25 + power 100, the top layer of the cardboard was completely removed, while the bottom-right corner with speed 75 + power 50 only leaves a faint mark on the cardboard.

2. Laser Cutting the Kit

I decided to make a construction kit with different neuron pieces that are asymmetrical and can be assembled freely, envisioning a brain organoid-like 3D chaotic result of clustered & interconnected neurons.

I messed up the file at my first round of cutting and they turned out very small, which are very cute but can’t fit properly due to the thickness of our cardboards. Thus I cut a second round with the enlarged neurons to test the fitting between joints and surprisingly they fit pretty well, a little bit tight but holds nicely.

I then started to play with different configurations of the connections, which all pretty much reflected the organic 3D look I envisioned. Since the joint size is limited by the thickness of the material, which limited the minimum size my neurons have to be for a proportional look, the final result is larger than I would like it to be, and the weight of itself limits how big the assembly can be, making it not as brain-organoid like as I’ve wanted. However, with the large neurons connecting freely in all these configurations, it turns out to be a pretty interesting looking piece. Maybe some painting in the future or connecting more neurons to it will make it even more alive.

3. Vinyl Cutting the Glyph

For the viny cutting, I wanted to cut something with a clean look, and our “Nano-Cybernetci Biotrek” group logo came to mind. It’s also just really nice to have a group logo sticker that looks pretty.

It looks great on my laptop!

Files

Neuron Kit File