LazerRazor

Inspiration

Forest, the member of the group who originally proposed the idea, has a unique talent of seeing past the constraints of a system, and envisioning an improved system. After using 3D printers and laser cutters for a variety of projects, he quickly realized how powerful a laser cutter would be if its printing area was not bound by two axes.  

What it does

    LazerRazor takes Gcode as an input, and can laser cut/engrave any 2d design on an infinitely large plane.

How we built it

    We started by designing the body in inventor and then cutting it into parts to 3d print better.  While two of our members did this, the other two began coding the arduino unit to control the robot.  As soon as the inventor design was done, we immediately started printing because we had a lot of hours of printing to do.  The body got slightly redesigned as we went along to cut down print time.  Once we got all the printing started and sorted, one member from the CAD team and one member from the coding team started working on electronics.  The other member who was working on CAD, then switched to trying to figure out the best mathematical way to break a curve down into steps (to help out the remaining coder).  Once enough parts were printed we started assembly by screwing a stepper motor to two pieces of the body and then screwing threaded rods into holes in the parts to give the overall structure more support.  Once the entire body was assembled we designed a laser mount and screwed it to the wooden top of our robot.

Challenges we ran into

    Due to the constraint of a 36 hour build time, we knew we would utilize 3D printing to construct virtually the entire body of the robot. However, our first inventor designs required upwards of 30 hours to print. Thus we had to undergo significant revision of these designs to decrease the time to print, without compromising the integrity of the structure.

    Another challenge that proved more difficult to overcome was the ability to control the laser power through the arduino board. With about 20 hours left in the competition, our lead Scott realized that he was unable to turn the laser off with his current arduino setup.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

    We are incredibly proud of taking the idea of the project and carrying it out into a working prototype. Every group member contributed in some essential manner and the final product reflects our team effort. Moreover, the current design reflects our best effort to create the robot, and it works astonishingly.

What we learned

    The weekend was filled was success, failures, and plenty of dank memes. The items below are the biggest things the group learned:

-3d printing will always take longer than expected -Large layer heights can ruin the accuracy of parts printed -Its easier (and Cheaper and shorter) to check the dimensions twice than to reprint a part.  

What's next for LazerRazor

Because the current design does not have a laser powerful enough to completely cut through wood, the next logical step would be to upgrade the laser as to accomplish this. In a different manner, the central concept of LazerRazor could be applied to other manufacturing process such plasma cutting or 3d printing. 

Built With

• 3dprinting
• arduino
• laser