The Beginning

So this week I tried my best to get ahead a bit so I wouldn't be writing this assignment up at 2 in morning. My plans were nearly foiled by the scheduling since the printers were all filled up on the planning website. However I was lucky to get in when before my appointment so now I get to write this up while the sun is still up. Yay!

So to start with I was way more intimated by this lab then I really needed to be. The thing that set me off to the wrong foot was Fusion 360 as a concept. It seemed really complicated, and vaguely artsy which is always scary. However going through and watching Kevin's videos on it and, they were very good at allevating my fears, and making me feel confident that I could do this week's assignment.

So the first thing I did when working on this assignment was to work through making the radation symbol that Kevin demostrated in the third video. What I figured out when making the emblem was the reason why this wasn't one of the assigned emblems because it was really kind of simple to put together. It's good for what Kevin wanted as in something to demostrate the basic skill, but it did make me feel overconfident going into the assigned project.

The Actual Assignment

So cool now I've been messing around on Fusion for a while and I'm actually ready to start working on the assignment. At this moment I'm going to share a regret of mine from this point in the assignment.The way I went about doing this was I opened Fusion and I just kept working and meddling with the design till it looked like the photo that I had pulled up not thinking about anything else other then the appearence of the design. What that practically means to you the reader is that there are not any pictures on the inbetween from the start till the thing is complete. Hopefully I can describe what was going so that you can still grasp my process.

So what I think we can all see is that the sketch for this symbol is way more complicated then the sketch of the radation symbol. Now let's break down what exactly makes it more complicated well to begin with we have four main circles that we are going to need to completely extrude. So to manage the ratio we need to have something to maintain that distance. Well what we had to do is make a triange connecting all of the center points.

What we needed to do was just draw those lines and then set them equal to one another, as well as setting the circumfrence of the three circles equal to one another as well. Now I have a symbol with three circles spaced equally apart but unfortunately this symbol has more to it then that. Well the circles in the middle of the circle really aren't the hardest thing to set up that's just a matter of having some circle that are from offset from one another in the center and around the edges.

The arms were bad, and not good, and are even annoying to think about. The best way that I could think to do it is by making the arms really two arms, and then having the circle working around so that I can just raise the right part. However once that was done, trying to make them equal to one another was the worst thing. I think that the issue was that I had some stuff over constained, but I couldn't find what the issue was so I was just stuck trying to figure out what the issue was. So at the end of the day I couldn't actually constrain it without Fusion being very upset with me, so I set the thing up as best I can and just kind of printed it, and I'll wait for Madison or Kevin to upset for them being a couple millimeters different. Althoug I recognize that Kevin will be upset because every line is not completely constrained, but shhh.

Slicing

The slicing was really easy. So easy that I probably wouldn't have included it but some mad person, probably Kevin, decided we need to have 20 photos so you get some photos I took of Prusa Slicer.

Print Time!

When it came to time to print I feel like the whole process went a whole lot smoother then it had any right going. So technically there was print error, but it was only one. Really I should've taken a photo, but I wasn't thinking about it at the time, and it wasn't anything spectacular. What happened from what I understand is that the filament just never really stuck to the bed so it moved around doing nothing good. So I paused it, talked to Kevin who told me not to worry and that printers just be like that sometimes. I recognized that he was right but I still needed to print the thing.

For the sake of honesty the photo here is not of a mistake I made but of a vaguely similar looking error I found. So i ended up needing to swap over to another printer, and this time it went off without a hitch, and I ended up with a little emblem. The filiment I picked because it was the most bland looking one withing arms reach, so I thought it was perfect. Turns out it kinda has a cool texture which is also fun!

Watching the printer go is kind of mesmerizing and I think you should have a warning for that since I wasted to much time staring at it. I also thought the printing pattern it made to make sure there was empty space inside was pretty cool.

Post Script

So a couple little things I want to write down as final thoughts. Firstly describing the symbol I made as a chemical symbol seemed strange to me at first as I didn't recognize it from any chemistry class. However upon looking up stock photos I found it is in fact the chemical weapons symbol which ia a fair bit darker and explains why it isn't in intro to chemistry. Also it fits a nice difficulty niche when compared to the other ones.

I do think the explosive or laser ones would be cool too though.

Secondly I want to testify how much this course has help with my patience as sometimes you get to the makerspace and you shall leave when you are done, when that is anyone could know. I also want to maybe suggest if it is possible to try to schedule variable appointments, to minimize suffering of students a staff. For prints like this one where it didn't take me more then an hour, I could get a shorter appointment, so another person can squeeze in. Then for other labs like maybe the next one, but I have no idea about that one, you can schedule either the full time or a longer one. I guess this doesn't help with people filling up multiple slots back to back. That I guess just needs to be an individual responsiblity thing. OH also Madison if you read this before the next time I talk to you professor Maitra came by and want to be let into the makerspace.

Download Files

You can click here to download the files I used