This week was our first of three days at the Champaign Urbana Fab Lab. The three stations that we will be working on are Digital embroidery, Arduinos, and laser cutting. This week I worked on the last of the three, laser cutting. We started out with the basics and took an image off the internet and converted it into a vector drawing, which led us into a quick discussion of the differences between a vector and a raster. We then went to the lasers and saw how they worked and went over the safety precautions to be taken.

We where then left on our own to design/convert our own design to laser cut or etch. I found a piece of red acrylic that gave me the idea of printing out a raspberry pi logo. So I found a logo online and it was surprisingly easy. The built in tool in Inkscape to convert a bitmap to a vector image worked perfectly and before I knew it I was cutting the acrylic! 

Even though this was a fairly simple design, I made a small mistake when exporting the file for printing in that I placed it too close to the edge of the page. You can see on the left side of the figure there is straight line. I failed to realize that you want to place the design a bit away from the edge because there is some imprecision to where the laser starts (that is, the top left corner of the material you are cutting is not always right under the starting point of the laser).

I feel that this technology is very complementary to 3D printing. Whereas 3D printing lets you create an endless amount of shapes, laser cutting lets you use very different types of materials, and at larger scales is much more cost effective than 3D printing, not to mention faster (my figure took less than a minute to cut, whereas 3D printing it would have taken in the one hour range). As we go on in this class I think that it is important that we not limit ourselves to 3D printing and think if our design could be made more economical by cutting.