Project Digital Fab Crab.

For my first project in my digital fabrication class I decided to make a keychain of a cute crab I saw in San jose. I imported the image I had of the crab into Adobe illustrator and made two designs: A laser cut stencil for the laser cutter and a versa works stencil for our sticker printer. I made sure both projects had the same dimension so they would fit perfectly together once cut. 

Then I used our epilog laser cutter to cut the keychain out of ⅜’ plywood. I had to export the project as A pdf and I had to use a windows machine due to the epilog software being only available on windows. Then I emailed my versa work stencil to our makerspace email address which is on all pcs hardwired to cnc machines. Then I used the roland's PC to add my stickers to the printing project.

After I got the laser cut keychain I proceeded to sand the wood until it didn't look charred anymore and added the crab sticker. The only thing I messed up in the design of this keychain was making the hole for the keychain too small, but I fixed my design and most likely will reprint it.   

The sticker printing went well even though I forgot to add my dotted cuts in illustrator. I didn’t face many challenges with this project due to me being fairly familiar with all of the equipment present in the innovation center. If I was going to do this project again I’d measure and use size references before cutting my project. 

Materials used

Sticker vinyl, ⅜’ plywood. 

Equipment used

Sandpaper,epilog laser cutter, roland sticker printer,macbook. 

software used

Adobe illustrator, versaworks, epilog.