My first step for this project was to come up with an idea, so with a quick image search a found a picture of the Death Star from Star Wars. I then put that picture into Adobe and sketched the outline. I still didn't know what I wanted to make but I knew I wanted something to do with my new drawing. After a little thinking, I decided that I would make it a sign, I would CNC the inside and laser etch smaller details. It had an outside ring with the trench and main pieces, these would all be mounted to a backing piece which I could laser cut.

The next step was to move it into Fusion 360 so I could cut it on the CNC.  Decided to use 1 inch thick plywood for the outside ring but if I did that then I would be wasting a 20x20 circle that I didn't use.  So I decided to cut the middle out of the same piece of wood, but since I wanted it lower than the ring I needed to cut the whole face down by 1/4 inch. This was easy to do in Fusion but it made the cut take much longer than expected. As the idea developed I wanted something more than just a wood sign, so I decided to light it up.  This meant that the trench and circle were made out of acrylic with leds behind them. This led to another problem of how to mount the acrylic to the wood, so I made a trench on the Fusion file which would allow the acrylic and wood to be flush.