Hello and welcome to Digital Fabricaiton for the Arts.

Links to relevant resources for the course as well as student contributions and discussions will be posted on this blog.

Please begin by viewing the syllabus page.

My modeled boxes files should be on blackboard, I submitted them through there because we were initially using it as our submission mechanism.

For the origami Test I used pepakura to unfold a simple 3D file I created using rhino. After pepakura unfolded the model into a vector format, I brought the file into photoshop and then illustrator to create and match textures onto the faces.

I modeled a small version of an OLPC laptop that I thought would be a nice gift to give away to people donating money to our Project Rwanda Fundraiser.

This is the final laser cutter design that was created with Pepakura Designer, the material I used is matboard which was not very ideal for folding because of the way in which it is layered which makes it hard to fold and tear.

The original design I had made for the folding assignment was much cooler and it was based on a tutorial by Hyoung-Gul Kook. The tutorial I followed can be found here http://livecomponents-ny.com/2010/03/22/4_5-tessellation-folding/

I had some trouble with the tutorial and Ali helped me contact Hyoung-Gul who very kindly helped me solve the issue I was having. Below is a picture of the model I made with the tutorial and on the left is the pepakura unfolded version. I laser cutted and tried to assemble the pepakura pattern but the tabs did not match together and the assembling was very complex to figure out without instructions.

I ended up making a small model for a table. I wanted to make an object that I liked so I went with the theme of making a design that feels organic. The table uses 2.5 axis milling profiling and engraving cuts.

Organic Table Video

For my final project for Digital Fabrication for the Arts I used the 6-axis ABB IRB 140 robot in the dFAb lab.  The goal of the project was to create a tool head that focused light onto photosensitive paper allowing various images and patterns to be programmed into the robot.

tool head

The tool design consisted of several elements.  A 3D printed head was made to align an LED with a lens shield to control the amount of light that was focused to the paper.  The printed part also holds a 12in cardboard tube straight out from the end of the robot.  At the end of the tube in a lens that creates the focused beam.  The final focal length of the tool was 10in out from the lens.  After calculating this measurement I programed the robot to move in and out of focus on the paper so that an image of varying texture, contrast, and light intensity could be programmed.

For my final project I used black and white photographs of figures behind tracing paper, translated them into height maps in rhino, printed them with the CNC and then sanded and painted their surface. The process created a primitive kind of 3D imaging by  treating the original photograph like a distance map and then translating that to 3D data. The resulting reliefs are a reflection on the computer’s desire to separate the figure from the surrounding noise.