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(Laser|vinyl) cutting and Fusion 360 (cont.)

Laser cutter training

As part of today's class we were trained to the the laser cutter in the fab lab and shown its operating instructions. Key takeaways:

  • A roof extractor removes smoke/fumes and must be turned on first. It takes a few minutes to spin up. Once running (as shown by small red LED behind the machine), power is enabled for the rest of the laser equipment: chiller, laser cutter, etc. The chiller should be turned on first, then two switches on the right side of the laser cutter turned on. The laser cutter has an air blower to keep the focusing optics clean. It is software-controlled, and the BLOWER setting must be set to YES.
  • Chlorinated and fluorinated plastics are out, PMMA and organics (paper, etc) are fair game.

Vinyl cutter

We were also trained to use vinyl cutter and shown its operating instructions. It can cut vinyl, copper foil, paper, etc. Transfer foil exists to transfer cut vinyl to other surfaces (it adheres more strongly to the vinyl than the vinyl does to its own backing). Heat transfer vinyl film also exists for iron-on application to clothing.

The copper foil can be used to directly create circuit traces. I'd like to try using the iron-on film as a chemical mask for chemically-etched circuit boards (using the heat-transfer vinyl as an alternative to error-prone heat transfer of laser printer toner).

Fusion 360 (cont.)

Today I wanted to use Fusion 360 to make a test coupon for laser cutting press-fit cardboard joints. The test coupon would be designed to have a series of interlocking slots each with an increasingly large tolerance of width to account for the kerf of the laser beam.

I encountered another limitation of Fusion 360: the rectangular array sketch tool does not allow for scaling (or rotation) per-occurrence, so I seemingly can't make slots of increasing width without drawing them manually.