Salut de Paris!

Day one of my conference just wrapped up, and while I don’t have a great CNC blog post, I saw a really cool new tech today that I want to try to reimplement at CMU (if I can convince Fran that is). Laser-Origami is a research project from a group in Potsdam that allows you to create single piece objects on a laser cutter with no manual assembly. Apparently CMU’s Mark Gross also consulted a bit on the project (he is mentioned in the acknowledgements on their paper)

Essentially, you intentionally defocus a lasercutter and run a bunch of passes of a piece of suspended acrylic. The join heats up, and bends down until it reaches a 90 degree angle. This allows the replacement of a lasercut finger joint for 90 degree bends. The technique can also be used to make layered platforms using spiral cuts, and far more complicated shapes and angles by attaching the material to a servo motor. It’s also EXTREMELY faster than 3d printing (obviously)

Video:

I picked up a copy of their paper and am probably going to attempt something similar next year after some long heart-to-hearts with DFAB people.  This was by far the coolest thing I saw today (out of a lot of pretty cool stuff).