the idea of this week's assignment is to design and cut a 2.5D mobile holder using fusion360 then the laser cutter.
The hands-on activity this week was to make cardboard for a phone holder in about 20 minutes, so I googled and picked the first tutorial it appeared to me. But I didn't really like it, I saw the cool stuff the other students have created and I decided to make a cool one too after the session. Fortunately, it was this week's assignment, and since I love elephants and have a lot of pens I thought to make the best out of this and choose this cool design.
material: Plywood 3 mm.
I used Autodesk Fusion 360 for sketching & LaserWork to prepare the file to be Cutted
Design steps:
-At first I chose the plane on which I'm going to sketch, I chose the ZY plane and started to design the elephant shape using circles and rectangles.
-Then I chose the XY plane to draw the bottom with T-slots.
-Then I drew the last sketch which is going to be in the front and back of the phone holder.
-I used the extrude feature to extrude the three sketches by 3mm like the thickness of the wood sheet I'm going to cut.
-Before joining them, I made a copy of the elephant and front component.
-And after that I joined them to make sure the tabs will fit in the slots made for them.
Preparing the file for cutting:
-I saved every sketch in DXF format in order to import it to LaserWork.
-I set the power to 75 and speed of cutting to 15.
-I finally saved the file in RLD format to be ready for cutting.
And voilà!
-I took a copy of the RLD file to the computer connected to the machine, adjusted the values, and downloaded it to the machine.
-Then I chose my file from the machine control panel and run it after checking the frame of the cutting.
-I chose my file from the control panel of the printer.
I had a problem with the stability of the phone holder, so Noha made a very cool suggestion which is to fill the back with some nuts so we can take the photo and add some base to the elephant later so it would be able to hold the phone even if it's empty.
She also helped me to finish the sketches and join the components correctly.
I actually made a mistake choosing the file for the elephant shape, I had two files one with the hole for the screws and one without it. I realized that after the cutting so the fab lab specialist who was with me Mr. Amr suggested to mark the place of the screws and use the electric drill to make them.
I had another problem with sketching the elephant shape, so I used this tutorial to make only the shape and take reasonable dimensions for the circles diameters.
I learned how to Design 2.5D models on fusion 360, which I will need to make the mockup for my project.
I noticed while cutting that the machine sometimes skips lines and finishes them at the end, I asked Mr. Amr and he told me because the sketches were not fully closed. So, it treats it as single lines, and in order to avoid that we should group the sketch first with the "Group" feature in LaserWork.
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