Computer Controlled Cutting

vinyl sticker

I have a lot of vinyl stickers, but I've never made my own, so this week was particularly exciting. I decided to make a couple different stickers. The first one, I designed myself. I designed a US maps with a few places marked where I have lived and visited (not all, that would be too much work).

I had to resize the map a bit in the mods program, but it printed great. With guess and check, I formatted the sticker to be 5 inches wide. Everything went pretty smoothly. Although, it took quite a while to get our the map icons and hearts, but it was worth it. It should be noted that it was weird to see the map in mirror image as I brought it home.

The sticker now hangs nicely on my door.

press-fit construction kit

The other individual assignment for the week was to lasercut a press fit kit that could be constructed in multiple ways. We also did a group project to characterized the lasercutter. I worked on checking the power settings to the lasercutter.

At first we found that some of the power settings were too high for the small cutouts (some of the 0 burned in first 10). For this experiment, the numbers corresponded to the power. You can see that the negative numbers designate a much smaller power setting.

I had a hard time deciding exactly what I wanted to make for my press-fit kit. I decided I would try to make a sphere, and then try other shapes with the same pieces. I designed my kit in OpenSCAD, with the file. The kit consists of three parts, although only two are used at a time. There is a quarter circle piece, a square piece, and a rectangle piece. The original quarter circle piece an outer radius that was 1.5x as big as as the smaller radius.

But this left only a bit of support outside of the chamfer. So, in a second design, I added the rectuangular parts and a quarter circle piece that had a radius that was twice as big as the smaller radius. This works much better for stability, but isn't as visually pleasing as some of the other parts together. To show off the different designs, I made a sphere and a waving roller coaster.

Although I don't think the sphere looks as nice with the bigger quarter circles.

This kit can also make some famous characters.

I even made a BB8!