Draftsight: Freemium alternative to Rhinoceros.
Inkscape: Open source vector graphics editor.
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:
6mm material was used to laser cut and engrave the designs using an Epilog Laser Fusion M2 printer.
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.
The following printer settings were used for the engraving of the robot.
As for the lines for cutting, the "win32 vector print" setting within Inkscape was used:
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:
Some hammering was required to fit the pieces together.