As a Course Assistant for the Product Realization Lab, I often encounter students who are excited to come into Room 36 to learn how to use the laser cutters and 3D printers to build interesting, functional assemblies. A good number of these students are there to pursue passion design projects, whether that is designing and constructing a doghouse for their pet or creating picture frames and nametags for their little siblings.
Sometimes this is their first time using the equipment, or taking on any design project and I think it would be interesting to create some sort of tool that will allow them to tweak and change parameters and spit out a ready to print laser cut file or 3D printable STL file.
For the purposes of this assignment, I want to design a tool that will generate a picture frame with sin/cos wave modulations on the top surface that can be manipulated, exported, and printed.
Intended users
Students who are new to 3D printing and laser cutting, who want to learn how to use the machines by making gifts for others.
Need you’re trying to provide a solution or support for
Easy way to explore 3D printing and Laser Cutting
Inputs
The inputs of the tool would be:
- Dimensions of the photo frame to match the photo size.
- Sin wave transformation variables (i.e. amplitude, phase, vertical shift etc.)
- External profile (i.e. will it be a circular frame, hexagonal, rectangular)
Underlying logic of the model you’ll implement & Outputs
It could also be interesting to consider how I could incorporate generative design into the tool. Maybe there are some interesting considerations around:
- Difficulty to 3D print
- “wacky” / complex design
- Print time.
- Number of parts within assembly
- Projected amount of printer support material required.
- Amount of printer material used.
All these metrics might be incorporated into some optimization/trade off algorithm that could generate a series of designs that the students could choose between printing.
Node logic will create an extruded profile that is subdivided into an array of cuboids with varying heights. The height of the cuboids, variety of heights, profile shapes etc will all be extracted from/controlled by user inputs. The software will derive metrics about the criteria discussed above based on measures of the spread + size + variety of the modulation heights and will generate/spit out a series of design options that the student/user can export and explore.