Week 9 - Struggles and Success with the Laser Cutters and the presentation

This past week, I finally managed to to make the cardstock prototypes of the beam and clamp with the school's Epilog Helix laser cutter and helped with the presentation. 

For the laser cutter, using the dedicated computer was unfortunately not an option as none of the staff knew how to access it. And so I downloaded the drivers to my laptop and attempted to follow the instructions that were emailed to as well on the official laser cutter website. Over the first two days in the lab, I attempted tried to cut the patter directly from SOLIDWORKS and AutoCAD, and at first the "jobs" (laser cutter paths) seemed to go to the machine, but the laser did not move and I assumed that it was because lack of direct compatibility with the cad programs and the laser cutter. However I also noted that after a while the job just didn't appear and after resetting the machine the laser cutter machine just remained "offline" on the printers and devices page. On the third day I came back with a temporary license for corelDRAW, but the laser cutter was always in "offline" state. I tried reinstalling the drivers, but it wouldn't even let go through with the process. I had then recontaced Mr. Furman, who then contacted IT. The following Tuesday I came back to the lab, and the persons from IT were just finishing setting up a new dedicated computer to work with the laser cutter. When they finished used the new computer to open my .dxf files with DraftSight, and after a little trial and error with the print options and a few air passes, I successfully cut out the pattern on six sheets with no further problems.

As for the presentation, I added several new slides that would explain the new aspects of our column design, reordered and edited some of existing slides for clarity.

Going forward, I will need to present next Wednesday, design several different kinds of support designs to so that the group can make load calculations of these structures, get in contact with other groups to work with Vander-Bend manufacturing, and begin work on the essay.