Week 2 - Parametric Design and Vinyl Cutting

Week 2: Making parametric design and vinyl cutting

Vinyl Cutting

I learned to do vinyl cutting using the open source tool developed by Neil and the Media Lab on the Roland Vinyl Cutter.

I've also been playing around a lot on Fusion360. I initially tried using FreeCAD but after struggling around with it for ~3+ hours, I decided to stick with Fusion, since I've used it before and I find the sketch to 3d workflow much more intuitive.

I'm going to try to make this design I made in Figma (for my favorite band) on the Vinyl cutter:

Here's a photo of the modproject interface when I put in a doodle of a pikachu batman:

This is inspired by my consistent profile photo:

Final product (ignore the background, I stuck it on my notebook that had a photo of snoopy in a batsuit):

Laser Cutting

Things that we figured out about the Laser Cutter in the EECS makerspace is that the kerf is about 0.0049 inches, and the clearance is about -0.0045 inches, meaning that we should design for an interference fit.

Hardware setup:

75w co2 laser (large machine)
- generates infrared light that gets focused to a tiny point. when this concentrated energy hits material, it instantly heads and vaporizes it along the programmed path.
- what "kerf" means (which is 0.0049'' average) is the width of material that gets completely removed by the beam
60w co2 laser (small machine)
universal laser systems hardware
universal control software for parameter control
inkscape for vector design and job sending

Design process

design vectors → red lines w/ 0.001'' weight is full cuts and blue lines (0.001'' weight) is engraving/scoring
focus the bean using the focusing stick until it just touches material surface
set parameters: 100% power, 30% speed baseline, 500 ppi
ctrl+p to send job to universal control software
turn on air compressor, hit green button

Things to remember!

focus accuracy determines cut quality—we use the white part of focusing stick
kerf compensation is needed in design (if very precise)
material thickness affects join clearance (-0.0045'' interference fit on cardboard)
the bed moves during focusing, laser tracks the material plane

Here's the final produce of the various building blocks I made:

I also made an engraving cut of an album I love, called Gone Now by Bleachers. It came out relatively okay on cardboard, even though some teaching with the strength of hte cuts and using a different material will probably make it come out better: