Website
You're looking at it!
I have some exposure to using git, so it was not too bad to set things up again. This site's HTML and CSS codes were written with much help from Google, StackOverFlow, and ChatGPT. How did people do it before these things are widely spread!? I strongly believe that CSS was made to torture its users and gatekeep.
Vinyl Cutting
I would like to thank Flaticon for its abundant of content. I chose to print a beaver in hope to inspire my engineering skills. I am unsure if that works, but now I have a beaver sticker!
It is a little larger than I was expecting because I did not check the size before pressing print, but now I know to do it next time. Other things I learned include pushing the level down before printing; navigating (sort of) the ModCE website; cleaning my work surface before handling transfer paper; and hand cutting the vinyl when my image doesn't have a bottom border. I'm pretty happy not with the sticker itself but rather the possibility of things that I can do after learning how to use a vinyl cutter.
Laser Cutting
I was told that I should not start a week's assignment the night before it due; I did not follow that advice. I am now learning that the advice is very solid. I also learned that I should not have turned off email notifications for GitLab's Issue Tracker. It is undoubtedly better to learn that earlier rather than later.
I had have no experience in CAD-ing, so I watched a few videos on Fusion360 the week prior. I then proceed to forget all about it citing life events. When I finally started thinking about the project, I thought about making something similar to this sphere-ish object, but then as the clock tick closer to lecture time, I thought about making a house kit intstead because I realized that I cannot make a copy of a body and changes the dimension independently from the original body. This inflexible feature of Fusion360 may be desirable in other circumstances, but it is not ideal in mine. Then I settled for the ball idea that I initially chose because it's not that fun to make a house out of cardboard (and I still haven't mastered the art of CADing fingers).
I first made a circle with four rectangular slits manually. I then rediscovered the rectangular pattern tool that was covered in lecture. After a few more hours staring at Fusion360, I discovered--much like how Christoper Columbus did--the circular pattern tool! After chamfering the corners, I ended up with something like the picture below.
I then create three more disks like this with different radius. The parameters that I used can be seen below. The value of the r02 parameter was initially set to 60mm, which is false. You will see that I would eventually learn that the hard way.
To join these disks, I create something similar to a half orange slice (if you were to pass it through a mandoline and then cut it into half circles). I used the mirroring tool and a whole lot of constraints to specify the width, height, and position of each of the rectangle.
Here is my first product using the laser cutter! Much thanks to the staffs in EDS for their patience as they guide me through using the cutter!
I then cut out the rest of the parts and fit them together. You can see that the second disk from the top is smaller than it should be. This is when I noticed my mistake and tumbled down a side path of correcting it which include adjusting the value of r02, reprinting the disks, and then reprinting the slice (whose curve edges were not handled well be the laser cutter's program).
After three long days, one of which is after the assignment's due date, I have my final product!
I may have had a slightly off number for the thickness of the cardboard or the kerf, because the fit is not perfect, but it is good enough to hold together through my bike rides for the rest of the day. The ball, if it can be called that, now live in a corner of my room. In my eyes, it is beautiful, but utterly useless--though maybe I will invent a sport with it that hopefully does not result in paper cuts.