April 6, 2018 Daily Weblog

Today, Mr. Halstead was there in ISR, so he taught Daniel and I how to work the laser cutter. We first downloaded the program Inkscape (to run it we also had to download xquartz) as it is the easier one to work with. However, for both of our projects, we would eventually like to get Onshape, which works more like a CAD program than a sketch program.

First things first, we had to set the workspace size (under file- document properties) and set it to 12 by 12 inches as those are the pieces of wood we have to work with up at the elab. Next, you make your lines, which there are two types of, vector cuts and rasper cuts. Rasper cuts are cut pixel by pixel and do not go through all the wood, but instead make a print or pattern on it. Vector cuts, which have to have a stroke width wider than 0.25 mm, go all the way through the wood.

After we made our designs (we were just practicing with keychain fobs) you have to download them as pdfs and send them to elab laser cutter email, lasercutter-elab@hpa.edu. We then go to the 3D printing and laser cutter computer and download the file, where we can open in and print it. It is actually surprisingly quick and looks really cool!

Looking through the instruction book, I found that, sadly, the laser cutter cannot cut Aluminum (I really was hoping it could so I could simply cut the pieces I need for the muon detector casing) however, it can engrave aluminum which will look really cool on the casing.