Week 3- Journal

This week's assignment was to design and fabricate our very own pen and pencil holder. The design should be done on Fusion 360 and the fabrication using the 3D printer. I was inspired by the honeycomb structure and I searched on google for different structures and different assemblies using the hexagon shape.

The softwares used for this assignment are Fusion 360 and Ultimaker Cura.

The machine used for this assignment is PRUSA i3 MK2 (3D printer).

The material used for this assignment is PLA (white and black).

This design did not take much time in the implementation, it only took time to makes sense of it in my head and visualise what I wanted to do. The requirements for this assignment were pretty clear and easy to implement. Since we had to use two 3D design features, I decided to use sweep and revolve to make my final design. My final design consists of a hexagon that has been swept on a curved path and a base that was made using revolve. After finalising my design, I changed the appearance of my model by adding a different material and colour. Finally, I exported my file as STL to import it into Ultimaker Cura.

After that, I rendered my model with the updated appearance, which is green metal, and took several shots.

Slicing the STL file in Cura is a crucial step before 3D printing. I imported my STL file into Cura and started slicing and found out that the time will exceed the 90 mins quota, so I scaled down my model and increased the layer height until the time was appropriate. I made sure that all the parameters were good to go and then exported my .gcode file.

Upon arriving at the ODC fablab, I started the 3D printer and put the .gcode file on the sd card, and started the printing process. It was going well for 20 minutes but unfortunately, the printer stopped working due to a temperature error (the nozzle heater stopped working). The fablab specialist had to stop the printer and troubleshoot.

After the 3D printer was fixed and ready to work again (3 days later), I printed my pen holder successfully this time! The printing took 1 hour and 13 mins to complete.

I had a problem with visualising what I had in mind into a design on Fusion. I felt like I couldn't communicate what I wanted to do with the software. I asked for help from Doaa and I had a problem with visualising what I had in mind into a design on Fusion. I felt like I couldn't communicate what I wanted to do with the software. I asked for help from Doaa, Rawan and Esraa after the session on Saturday and they were of great help!

Doaa and Rawan sat with me and broke down what I wanted to do into bits and pieces to be able to visualise it more clearly and to be able to implement it into a 3D design. We started drawing examples step by step to help me understand how to make it on my own.

Esraa gave me links to tutorials and showed me pictures of what she did when she was in the maker diploma to help me understand how to make my own design.

Honestly, their feedback was extremely helpful and it lead to me finishing my design quickly and efficiently.

The biggest challenge in this assignment was to make sure that the proportions of the design are correct and that it won't take too much time to 3D print (no more than 90 mins). Another limitation for this assignment was having to use at least two 3D features from Fusion, this limited my design thinking into having to include both of these features in my design which constrained the way I approached my design.

I looked at several designs online and tutorials to be able to understand how they built their model and what are the right sizes for each part to ensure stability.

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 the different types of joints on Fusion and seeing the demonstration (animation) before fabricating the model. Also, rendering our final models was extremely easy and the resulted quality is very good.

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

The model should:

1. be three dimensional

2. consisting of multiple 2.5D simple parts that assemble together or a single 3D Part

I followed a youtube tutorial (https://youtu.be/ASRC2NLlubA) since I didn't know how to make a 3D object without making the sketches first. I followed the steps in the tutorial but I changed the measurements and the shape of the slot that will trim the figure.

During Wednesday's mid-week session, we played a game as an ice breaker where each one of us had to draw an animal they see themselves as. The purpose of this game was to see which qualities and skills does each person wish to aquire and how it reflects on their personality. I chose to be a giraffe because they are very chill animals who can run quickly and have the advantage of their long necks.

The next part of the session was also pair modeling. I was paired up with Lama and we were all asked to model the base and the ball of the fidget object. Lama was a great partner to have as we understood each other very well and we were able to finish the task quickly and efficiently.

After the time elapsed, we presented our work and took feedback from Sherif on how to make these models in fewer steps and in a smarter way using one or two steps.

In this end-of-week session, we were given a task at the beginning to make the highest stable tower using only paper. I was grouped with Salma and Sidkie to make the tower. It was a very challenging task that we were not successful in being the highest tower. This was due to wasting our time trying to make different trials that unfortunately didn't work.

After that, we were given the main task of the session which was to model a mini Lego figurine (head and torso) using Fusion. I was paired up with Lama and as mentioned before, she's a great partner to have. We started by modeling the head (I was the driver and Lama was the navigator). Going by Sherif's feedback from the Monday session, we wanted to make the model with the least steps, so we made the head with revolve and extrude (cut). Then we switched and moved to the torso part. It was a bit challenging to read the dimensions at first but once we figured it out we were good to go. After we finished both parts, we put them together in the same file and assembled them together using movable joints. The joint we used was the rotary one and we limited the joint so that the head does not rotate the full 360. After we finished, we still had some time left so we rendered our mini figurine and we attempted to start the pants part but we weren't able to finish it on time.