Week 1

Signed Student Agreement

Parametric Construction Kit

After meeting some of my classmates and hearing everyone's introductions, I am sure some people's assignments for this week are going to look like legitimate works of art.

Having no design/CAD experience, I figured my best bet for this assignment was to keep it simple. Still, I wanted whatever I built to be useful, and after looking at how cluttered my side desk was, I decided to construct a paper tray.

I found completing this assignment challenging. It wasn't anything extraordinary, but dealing with fusion at times felt like hitting my head against the wall. It took me forever to do very basic things, but eventually I got the hang of it. The last few parts took me very little time to make relative to the first ones.

First, I designed the base plate and the back wall. The idea was to have slots along the outer surfaces of the object so that the shelves could be inserted with tabs later. My little touch of flair was adding an arched cut along the front facing edge to facilitate grabbing papers.

I made the base plate the "backbone." Structurally, it does a lot of heavy lifting. It has slots cut out all along its edges so that the back wall and the two side panels will fit into it. It's about 9.5x11 inches, as I figured an inch would be about enough wiggle room to account for material thickness, a little clearance on either side of the side panels, and for standard letter-sized paper to fit (somewhat) comfortably.The shelves were designed from this same piece, as I just duplicated it and cut off the extra bits to replace the slots with tabs (since the trays are also smaller than the base plate).

The back wall and side panels were then designed to have slots at my desired tray heights and tabs along the edges to assemble the exterior structure and support the trays inside. I took an approach similar to Alfonso's during recitation where he made the 3D puzzle pieces: make a rough exterior, and adjust the details so all the pieces match.

Though the CAD took me a while, it was nowhere near as frustrating as troubleshooting when doing the cutting. I had done this parametrically, as I mentioned, but man, should I have used way more parameters. I did not have the correct material thickness in my CAD design. No worries, I figured: that's a parameter in my fusion file. I changed it, and a bunch of things changed, but not everything changed uniformly.

I thought projections would be my friends, but they betrayed me. A lot of the slots and tabs were made using projections from where two bodies intersected. Since in my head material thickness was accounted for, I just went with it and did not give a second thought to adding parametric dimensions to the sketches I then extruded/cut (since they did, after all, match the material thickness — I just forgot to tell that to my computer...)

In the picture above, you can see an example of this. The red part is the side panel with the correct dimensions. Instead of fixing both parts in fusion, I realized I could just fix one and print it twice, so I took the lazy way out (though I would call it the time-efficient approach). The tabs are visibly thicker in the green part (incorrect dimensions) and the slots are mismatched (highlighting my parametric inconsistency). I had to do similar fixes on the trays; luckily the back panel and base plate parametrically behaved. After another hour of fighting fusion to correct my mistakes, I got everything correct. Then I spent another half hour trying to get the correct sketches as .dxf files. Boy was this annoying. Still, incredibly rewarding to have constructed my paper tray! That's the first time I built anything without instructions in my life.

Now, my desk is all nice and tidy! (Pictured below for reference)

Vinyl Cutting

For the "cut something on the vinyl cutter" assignment, I cut something on the vinyl cutter. It was the "cricut" sticker that is cut at the end of setting up everything on your computer. Now, I know this very much seems like taking the lazy way out. I was going to cut a little sticker with a nuclear spin on it (since it is related to my research). Then, as I was about to start cutting it, my computer died. My charger was in my office across campus. I took it as a sign from god that it was time to go do something else, as I am pressed for time research-wise this week, and I technically completed the assignment. What's important is: I learned how to use the vinyl cutter, and now I get to make free stickers! Rest assured I will vinyl cut again...