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All the software installations took a bunch of time. Especially kokopelli since I was rusty on linux.
- Got fascinated and carried away by awesomeness of sliceforms, and found how they are mathematically beautiful. A friend showed me this, so got super inspired. http://sliceforms.wordpress.com/
- Made a model in sketchup and sliced it using the slicer and slice modeler plugin. Repeated this process n times. Sketchup looks its good and free, but its only free. Its a complicated CAD software (more than solidworks, because of no tutorials by Google). Simple tools like freehand drawing were hard-to-find and tools like rotation were made complicated to overkill. The interfacing was quite restrictive too. After all this pain, I finally managed to slice up a model, and svg-ing it turned out to be another pain. It has a plugin called flight-of-ideas for this, which is pretty useless because it gives distorted and weirdly aligned components. So after all this trouble, decided to change my mind to use kokopelli.
- Just to get familiar with python and kokopelli, I started out by making a lampshade model. Cutting it horizontally and radially. The script is here.
- The TA Guillermo told me about using 123D Make for slicing, and I got another opportunity to pursue the slicing dream. I played with it for sometime, used stl files from the internet and made some slices. The good thing about 123D Make is the parametrization : it lets you chose the material dimensions and slicing style. This time it was windows 8 that was standing against me. Stupid windows 8 has a bad resolution agreement with 123D because of which I couldn't find the way to export my nicely generated slices. The two optoins were hiding somewhere, to be used by me. Internet helped me through this problem.
The other good thing was that all the slices had numbers and the slots were numbered to tell which slot goes where. I played with slicing axis and style to get the exact slices I wanted. - Went to the shop with multiple parametric designs a day before it was due. The lampshade dint work out because I had trouble figuring out the png to laser cutter route. But the slice cutting didnt have that problem. 123D make exports these slices as dxf, which can be read directly in AutoCad or Rhino, both of which can plot using the Epilog. First made a dodecahedron. This needed one test cut to guess the right thickness, and then it worked well.
- I then tried to make a sliceform toroid, I already had the dxfs for which. I planned to make it with paper (slightly thicker than printer paper). At the first time, the part piece just flew away so I had to stop it there. I tried it again, having a chipboard over the paper, and increasing the power a bit and lowering the speed so that it really cuts all-the-way through the board. It did not so bad but the parts were not fully cut and I had to use the knife to get them out. There were three sheets for each torus, and given I wanted a 2 colored one, I printed the same thing on two different colors. For the second sheet I increased the power a bit, only to realize that the paper cuts it produced were half burnt away. Well, I went back to a mid-range power, and manually cut the pieces out by a knife. These are what the cut-outs looked like
Assembling these together was a pain. They wont stay in place, and random cuts want to merge while you are working on a different cut. So plan failed.
Changed my mind and printed it on a thicker card paper. this worked quite well, except that it doesnt flex as much I'd like it to. Assembling was not so easy, but better than the paper version. Ideally the sliced torus should be compressible to an elliptical torus, even a plane! Maybe I should have made bigger slots in the same paper!
Press Fit Construction kit :