Week 2 - Journal

This week's assignment was to design and fabricate our very own mobile phone holder. The design should be done on Fusion 360 and the fabrication using the Laser Cutter.

The softwares used for this assignment are Fusion 360 and RdWorks.

The machine used for this assignment is Malky ML1930 (laser cutter).

The material used for this assignment is plywood.

Starting with sketching on Fusion and going through several trials and errors until I got the measurements correct. The assembly feature in Fusion helped me a lot with visualising the final outcome and adjusting the correct measurements for each part. After everything fit together properly and the proportions were okay, I exported each sketch as a DXF file to import it in Rdworks.

Preparing the DXF file for the laser cutter is an essential step before the fabrication. Using Rdworks, I imported the dxf files and arranged them so as to save as much space as I can. I kept the settings of the speed and power as they were from the last assignment and I saved the file in .rld format. I then saved the file (SavetoUFile) and was ready to put it in the laser cutter.

After arriving at the ODC fablab, I started opening my files and double-checking that everything is good to go. I started the Laser Cutter and put my file on the flash drive. I then put the flash drive in the Laser Cutter, adjusted the origin and the focus, checked my work time, and started cutting.

I had an issue with understanding the technicalities behind how to make a sketch fully-defined and I went to Esraa for help during the Saturday session. She was extremely helpful and taught me a lot of tips and tricks that helped me in my assignment.

I also took feedback from her about the idea of my assignment and she pointed out a few things that I should take into consideration when designing and implementing my mobile holder.

When I arrived at the fablab I found Mohammed Ghazaly and Ahmed Waleed already there working on their own projects. Ghazaly needed help with operating the laser cutter and exporting his files from RdWorks to be able to put it on the laser cutter. I helped him out and gave him feedback on his design. Waleed wanted to show us his designs and asked for my help with the 3D printer and Cura. Ghazaly and I helped Waleed with what he wanted and we all took pictures for each other's product's documentation. It was nice having them present as we were there for each other when any one needed any help on the spot.

The biggest challenge in this assignment was to make sure that all the sketch lines in Fusion 360 were fully-defined. This took a lot of practice, deleting and redoing the parts until they all were fully defined. Another challenge was finding out that the proportions don't add up and the parts don't fit after extruding and assembling them, which lead to going back to the sketches and adjusting them several times until they were all in the right place with the right size.

Designing and implementing my own project from start to finish using Fusion 360 was a vital skill I needed to learn in order to be able to do that with my final project. Becoming familiar with all the tools and features of Fusion on my own is extremely helpful knowledge for implementing my final project. Understanding the joints and proportions of things will also be of great help in my final project and will hopefully shorten the duration of trials and errors in the future.

Learning that Fusion can assemble the parts of the model on its own! This discovery was mindblowing for me as I have never something done like this outside of animation.

In this week's "Hands-on, Minds-on" activity we were asked to build a model of a simple mobile phone holder.

The model should:

1. be made out of cardboard

2. be designed to rest on a flat surface

My model consists of 2 right-angled triangles and 3 rectangles. Since the model's building blocks have right-angled triangles, this resulted in having 2 different slopes for the mobile phone to rest on. A very important aspect that I wanted my model to have was to give the user the option of holding their phone both vertically and horizontally.

I used glue to stick the 3 base parts together but for the rest of the parts, I used the slit and slab mechanism.

The challenges I faced were the thickness of the cardboard; for the base part that the phone should rest on, I had to glue 2 identical parts together to ensure that it will be sturdy enough to hold the phone. Another challenge I faced was the thickness of the slit in the cardboard because I made a slit that was too big it did not hold in place and fell when the phone was put on it.

I could improve this model by figuring out a way for it to be made and assembled without glue and to make it larger to fit 2 mobile phones standing vertically at the same time (now they only fit when they are placed horizontally). I could also include slits for the phone chargers.

I also made another rapid very simple model.

This week we were required to install and get familiar with Fusion 360. Before the mid-week session, we were required to watch several tutorials on how to sketch on Fusion 360 and to see if there were any problems.

During Wednesday's mid-week session, we were introduced to pair modeling where we were split into pairs and asked to make a sketch of a fidget spinner on Fusion. I was paired up with Amr and we faced several technical issues but we were able to finish the task on time. After the time elapsed, we presented our work and took fruitful feedback from Sherif on how to quicken the process and how to get the best outcome with the least steps to avoid confusion.

In the end-of-week practice videos, we followed a tutorial on how to make a wardrobe model on Fusion, from sketching to solids to joints.

In this end-of-week session, we were given a task to make a rocking chair on Fusion and then cut it on the laser cutter. We were split into groups and I was paired up with Ahmed Waleed. We split the parts on each other and started working.

After we finished finalising everything on Fusion and Rdworks, we started cutting and assembling our chair.