Week 14

Wildcard Week

12/04/2025-12/10/2025

Characterizing the Design

I first tested a few different confiruations of the laser cutter MOPA IR's speed, power, frequency, and lines per cm using the material test array feature in XTool to quickly generate the test grid.

The first test we ran was with max power 50, min power 0.1, 15 columns and spacing 1; max speed 1000, min speed 50, 15 rows, and spacing 1.

The result was not very optimal, with mostly black colors and the lower power producing some bronze and white colors. Thus, for the second try, we went with the lower power setting of 12, and this time we are removing some of the lower speed for faster turnover time. For speed settings, we went with max 1000, min 300, 10 rows, and 0.8 spacing; for frequency, we went with max 2000, min 500, 10 columns, and 0.8 spacing.

The result showed another pattern, the lower speed at various frequencies are able to produce bronze/copperish colors, while the high speeds are leaning more towards the white. It seems like some of the low speed we removed for faster laser cut time could be crucial to making the colors show on stainless steel. Thus, we decided in our last cut that we will include the lower speed for potentially more colors. We increased the power setting a little bit to 13.5. Then for speed, we tested max 1500, min 300, 10 rows, and 0.8 spacing; for frequency, we went with max 2000, min 50, 10 columns, and 0.8 spacing.

These settings are much better as a spectrum of colors start to appear at lower speed. We see brown, grey, blue, and purple specifically. However this is not quite enough if we want to make something more colorful, especially the idea that Sun proposed of remaking Pink Floyd's famou album cover: 'The Dark Side of the Moon'.

Making the Cut

As my time slot came to an end, I worked with Sun in figuring out the final color set up we want to use for making Pink Floyd's Darkside of the Moon album. The first cut the triangle line stroke wasn't really coming out. The second cut was better, giving a rainbow like pattern.

We needed to do some post processing after cutting out the design with the MetalFab laser cutter, we sanded the edges to make it smooth.

Resources and Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jiaming for showing me how to laser cut metal. Thanks to Sun for helping me with my laser cut.