2D DESIGN AND LASER CUTTING


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SOFTWARE

Draftsight: Freemium alternative to Rhinoceros.

Inkscape: Open source vector graphics editor.

DESIGN OF A PRESS FIT KIT

Inkscape was the tool of choice. Figure below, illustrates the process of designing a robot pen holder.

Step 1: Square tool is used to create a squares for the design.

Inkscape has a handy feature in the file menu to align squares. To get there in the file menu, click on Object/Align and Distribute.

The circle tool was used to draw the eyes of the robot.

Step 2: Union operator was used in the file menu under path/union to get the design. Also ears were hand drawn, copied and mirrored.

STEP 3: The design was copied twice, eyes were deleted from one of the faces.

STEP 4: An arm was hand-drawn using the pencil tool and then coloured. This was followed by changing the colours, blue for vector and black for raster.

A box was also designed. Maker-Case website was used to generate a box with the following settings:

Box dimensions
(50x50x50)mm

Material Thickness
6mm

Edge Joints
T-slot

Tab width
11mm

Screw Diameter
M3

Screw Length
12mm
  

Cartoon bitmap designs were imported into Inkscape and converted into vectors using the trace function as follows:

box

LASER CUTTING OF DESIGNS

6mm material was used to laser cut and engrave the designs using an Epilog Laser Fusion M2 printer.

Problems

While engraving the design of the penholder's arms, it was necessary to convert the 'arms' to a vector image.

This was done by the "Trace bitmap" option in Inkscape.

Printer Settings

The following printer settings were used for the engraving of the robot.

rastersettings

As for the lines for cutting, the "win32 vector print" setting within Inkscape was used:

inkscapevectorprint

The following laser cutter 'printer settings' were applied:

DPI: 600
POWER: 100%
SPEED: 3%
FREQ: 25
PIECE SIZE: (1000x600)mm
JOB TYPE: VECTOR
    

The resulting cut looks as follows:

robotcut

Some hammering was required to fit the pieces together.

robotcut

FILES

Robot Pen Holder
Cartoon Box

RESOURCES

MakerCase website