Week 2: Laser Cutting

  Hello everyone. This is the second week of documentation and this week we learnt about laser cutting. Its a really useful tool, being able to cut out specific shapes and designs out of materials like wood or acrylic.

Our Task this week was to create a phone stand and here's my one. We had to use something we learnt as well which was parametric. This means that we can basically set a length value to a word and this makes it very convenient as if you are not sure about the length of your material we can change it very easily on the day itself

LASER CUTTING

So my idea for a phone stand was a man sitting down and the phone laying on his back so I came up with a drawing.

This my parametric

I only had one parametric which was my material thickness at for now 3mm

The guy is sitting down and the piece sticking out behind him is the place where the phone will go. This was the design drawing and jpg of the image and using the jpg to SVG technique I learnt last week I was able to turn this into a sketch as seen here.

There had to be two points in which there had to be connector beams to keep the stand stable so I put it in two spots which seems the most structurally sound. The length of the rectangle beam is 5mm and the height would just be the thickness of the material which below is 3mm for example which is my parametric.

After extruding out my parametric (3mm) in fusion this was the result.

And here it is where the beams are inside after extruding the rectangles.

And now with the final piece inserted.

It was a fun project to work on but I have 2 fears for this:

1. The jpg to SVG did not really come out smooth and the back of the designs look a bit rough which I fear might be a bit bad if laser cut

2. Is that the piece is not really stable and might topple when a phone is placed on it

All in all for me it looks decent but it didn't really come out like a guy sitting down and more like some dinosaur so I have no idea until it is actually printed. For future reference I think I have to find different methods to get the base design sketch. Not sure how yet but there should be a better way for these to come out. Parametric is really a useful thing to have, it makes it really convenient to design the 3d model as you don't have to keep remembering my material thickness value and it helps in later stages as well when laser cutting.

Well that's my blog this week hope this project was interesting and a good read. More stuff to come soon!

Week 1: Intro to CP5070 CHEMICAL PRODUCT DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT

  Hello Everyone! 

This will be the first of what should be many blogs on my journey through this module of chemical product design and development. Last semester my group and I were able to conceive and create a prototype of a chemical product which was a vacuum pump coffee machine.

This was a fun project to work on but after thinking it through we probably want to work on something else.

This semester we would be working on the design and implementation of our idea and we would be learning a lot more skills this semester as well like laser cutting and Arduino programming which I only have little experience on. 

We also started working on Fusion 360 again. 

Objective of this is just a quick refresher of what we learnt last semester

Fusion 360

Firstly, I made the keychain base using this video

And this was my base sketch

I wanted to put a logo on it that could be laser cut as you really have to check whether or not the logo is able to be cut out and it would still look complete as if for example, you cut out a ring shape, it would appear as a circle instead. I gave it a thought and I thought that the green lantern logo looks like it would work. This it the image of the logo

I followed this video here to convert a png/jpg file into a SVG file that can be used in fusion 360 

This was my final sketch with the logo on the base of the keychain

Here are the links for the software that I used and was featured in the video:

https://www.gimp.org/

https://inkscape.org/

They are free and really useful tools to have. The video was pretty easy to follow as well which is good.

Continuing on from the first video after extruding out the sketch here is the final product in Fusion 360.

I'm very satisfied with how this turned out I think it looks great! Defiantly a good refresher of a very useful tool fusion 360, maybe I could use this to assist me in prototyping in the future. Furthermore I now know how to convert the png/jpg files into fusion which i was having trouble with in the past.

Thanks for reading the blog hopefully more interesting ventures come soon!