I envision a cardboard dinosaur or dragon. The main difference is if time permits a few flimsy wings. The main feature I hope to incorporate is that it can eat my phone. This could serve as a 2FA alarm clock or a study focus tool. There will be a spot beneath the tail you could plug a charger into. I envision two main side panels with a host of connecting panels in the third dimension and one for the phone slide/digestive tract. Unsure what locking mechanism to go with to preserve both sturdiness (enough to handle a phone dropping into it at least) and form (too much excess material and it may no longer look like a dinosaur dragon). The tail and wings and fire breath (extra barrier to phone access, both physicaly and symbolically) would be separate pieces, probably attached with a single weak joint to allow for some motion. A living hinge would also be a great way to impart motion on the tail and it could be cut directly onto the back piece.
Early on, my biggest troubles were working on dimensioning for small features and having to spend some time on connection methods and placements. The sketch at the top of the page took just a few minutes in terms of getting my creative vision on the page in some form that made sense. The hardest part was tying dimensions to it. I spent a huge portion of time trying to translate the dino from sketch to CAD. This is an early CAD sketch made in Fusion360.
Here my vision was starting to take shape. I dimensioned everything to get a shape thet mostly matched my sketch through lots of tinkering with dimensions. I eventually pinned everything down by dimensioning it nearly exactly as it was. This isn't how I would typically approach CAD, but given the artistic nature of this design, I thought it worked best here. You can also see I took the simple approach of two dinosaur-shaped profiles with connecting pieces. I made each segment connectable with a single tab of a finger joint (or a full joint on small parts I expected to get lots of traffic like the mouth) and made the tabs all different sizes. That way there was truly only one solution to the puzzle.
I used the 0.1 mm offset our group calculated. It wasn't enough for the joints to hold. I also had an issue with the exporting that I didn't realize till later, which may mean I messed up some of the offsets. Regardless, I decided I needed some slip joints for more structure.
The dxf was exporting with both the original and the offset, which were not very far apart on the laser cutter software, so it just looked like a double line. I'm not sure which one I deleted. It may have even been a different one for each piece.
Voila
I vinyl cut a cat sticker during the tutorial. I couldn't find a photo from this. I will soon add vinyl decals to the dinosaur.
He's a character from a game. He's named Om Nom. In the game he eats candies. My dinosaur eats much larger things.
Finished application of negative onto dinosaur back piece.