Lantern Project

Description: For the second Design and Engineering Projects, we decided to do the Lantern Project. Me and Alex made a laser cut wood lantern around the theme of Christmas using Fusion 360, Adobe Illustrator, and their tools. 

Brainstorm: At the beginning before Project 1, we were taught by Ms. Tran on basics to laser cut and later we learned how to use Adobe Illustrator to mark what to engrave and cut out. From there, me and Alex created three sketches in Notability of ideas for what are lantern was going to be about. We ended up choosing the tree cutout with designs within it. Me and Alex decided to split the work and planned to trace each face of the lantern on Fusion 360 individually, using the skills we used from our previous project. 

Procedure: At first we were given a tutorial by Ms. Tran on all the tools to use to create the prototype. Then, we were assigned our groups, and I got paired with Alex. For the lantern project, we had to laser cut two faces and chose to make it Christmas themed. Me and Alex decided to each do a face, and individually trace each design to go on the faces. Me and Alex each sketched 2 main Christmas designs along with smaller items surrounding them. We used the fit point spline, lines, and arcs to trace each . From there we put our projects into Adobe Illustrator and decided which things were to be cut and engraved. To cut, we set the line to 0.01 and to engrave we would set the line to 0.708. It took a while for us to get past this step because the tree outline for my face was overlapped with some ornaments inside the tree. This made the process harder because I had to select individual lines manually to choose wether to engrave or cut. Finally we went through multiple prototypes to achieve the desired look and glued the two faces together with connecting wood sheets. Alex and I measured the width of the tree and made a long base to stabilize the two faces. Then we shrunk that base to multiple smaller rectangles for more stability around the sides. Finally, we hung our lantern and put lights inside. 

Here are some photos of our prototypes and designs:

This was our final design for the faces of our lantern all sketched :

This is our last and final model! This model included the faces attached together with lights installed and hanging. We turned this one in to Ms Tran.

Reflection - SOUL:

S (Strength of your Work) - I would say our biggest strength was our designs as well as how we split our work, I'd say our designs were pretty good and intricate; we also made sure to have an even workload, each of us working on a face.

O (Opportunities to improve your project) - Alex and I could've been better with our time management, we spent a little too long on the designs, and could have laser cutted sooner. 

U (Understanding) - I have learned that it takes a lot of work to create a lantern! The designs each take a lot of precision and there were a lot of steps taken to create this. 

L (Limitations you encountered in this project) - I feel that if we had more time we could've done a better overall job. The project felt kind of rushed and a lot of times it felt like the chocolate group was the one you were working with the most. However we made do of what time we had. 

WISCR: 

Self-motivated individuals - We spent a lot of effort and time on this project. We did not have much time to complete this but we were able to achieve the design we wanted. We tried to make this project the best we could, and we were motivated to finish.

Clear communicators - During this project, we displayed Clear Communication and were clear communicators with each other. We designated roles to ourselves so that we could finish this project as soon as possible, and keep both of us productive throughout the project. We could have been better about time management and planning, but at the end we finished the project well. We tried to contribute as much as each person could.