In order to use machinery in the space, you are expected to go through Fimbel and follow their procedures for booking/reserving the machine.
You can reserve the laser cutter here. You should already have your SVG files prepped.
You must book an appointment with staff in order to use the embroidery machines. The link will be included once the Fimbel's website is fixed, but in the meantime, you can find the different staff members that you can book an appointment with here.
The SVG files that you are able to generate with p5.js will not necessarily be set to do cuts (which require lines to be set to a very particular thickness). As such, you may need to add in additional lines with stroke weight 0.0025 if you would like things to be cut. For engraving, the existing SVG is fine.
You should restrict yourself to the following colors: black, white, pure red, pure green, or pure blue. I'd recommend a black and white design when beginning, so you do not need to rely on techniques such as color mapping.
Remember that when you make a stamp, everything will be reversed, with the engraved parts being what you don’t see (your design will be the negative). An easy way to fix this—black background, white design on p5.
Most of the resources on the embroidery machine will be given to you from folks in Fimbel, with the most general guide being located here. As such, I won’t go into the machinery and embroidery software. Rather, I will be going over things to consider when you are selecting a design.
When you generate a design you like, be sure to save it with your S key!
Open your SVG file in Illustrator. Export it as an EMF file to bring it into the software for the embroidery machine! You do not need to make any additional changes to be able to convert the file.
The more colors you want to have, the more thread changes you’re going to have to make when the machine is running. In other words, more colors means more labor.
Gradients are technically possible with only using two thread colors, but that’s only somewhat feasible if everything in your design is connected as one shape. If you’re doing disconnected shapes, you may run into issues.
The machine can only create designs that are only so big. If you’re making an incredibly detailed or large design, keep in mind that you may need to resize it to fit. And if you’re resizing things to be smaller, you may get to a point where those details simply don’t transfer over to the software (it’ll consider certain things to be no stitches big).
Simpler designs given our size constraints can be better.
The more floating/disconnected parts you have, the more times the machine needs to jump between segments, meaning more threads that you will need to address after.
Minimize the number of shapes that are disconnected from each other to save yourself some cleanup.
Theoretically, you can do a conversion to go from SVG to a file format for the CNC machine/waterjet. However, given that I have not tested that and the significantly higher bar to entry for using both machines, I will not be covering that in this course.