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Sanding texture tool:

Since my theme is the organizer I am considering finding material to make something similar to a basket. I noticed some home decorations are made of yarn and wood, which is super natural and pretty. I decided to try something on the yarn and wood. 

For the connection between the yarn and wood, I found the screw eyes of the 0 # model. The raw materials are shown below, including solid wood, 4mm yarn, and screw eyes. And finding a piece of wood to learn how to knit the yarn and ensure the feasibility of the connection between the yarn and wood. For knitting, there are lots of tutorials you can find online. 

Sketch:

I saw the solid wood into 6 pieces of the same size. And dig a hole to install the screw eyes and the side of the wood which needs to connect to the yarn.

The hardest thing is to make sure where to install the screw eyes and how to knit the yarn to make sure the connection. The FOUR bottom pieces are important, and the “wall” of the basket is easier. Knitting takes more time than I thought, almost spending my 5 hours to finish the piece. I can barely feel my hands after I knit. 😂

Final Output:

Since I have an almost finished circuit for the midterm of another class “connected device”, which also needs to make an enclosure for the device. So this assignment could be my prototyping for the midterm.

First, I made the circuit and Arduino as small as possible. Since I may iterate the circuit, I use the solderless board. And I haven’t soldered the button and led, I tried to put all the windows on a flat surface.

 
the inside circuit and Arduino

I draw and cut the outline of each piece first, verifying the size of the enclosure. And then put the circuit inside to estimate the position of each output and input. The reason to do these separately is I use the solderless board. The positions don’t need to be precise if I soldered each component on a soldering board.

I keep the right side to be a door and stick a doorsill. But the doorsill occupies the space the circuit cannot take out. So I change it to a small square doorsill which also works well. 

I give a relatively larger space for the thickness of the circuit since the solderless wire needs space. But putting protective films to stabilize the position of the circuit and make sure the button could be pressed from outside.

Here is the final piece!

For the laser cut assignment, I decide to make a 3d organizer. Since I learned some laser skills last semester for my pcomp final and I found it hard to make 3d objects with perfect size since the cutting surface is not straight which Phil also mentioned in class. Another reason is that the loss of laser cutting will bring size errors.

I think about 2 solutions for the imperfect size. One is to use a sander to smooth the edge. Another way is to take the loss into account when drawing, and appropriately increase the length, in 0.01mm; In addition, wood glue is used to make up the gaps caused by irregular edges when sticking. This time I choose the second method, not using the sander, because the sander also easy to leads to imprecision.

The sketches in Illustrator were as below.

I am going to make a hollow-carved storage box, and my personal logo is also printed on it. The hollow-carved effect is chosen to be a checkerboard grid so that it can contain raster and vector. And I try to give different gray scales to the grid. There are TWO problems I met in the process.

1. Apparently, when rastering the grids, the different gray scales are hard to notice, I have to say there is no difference.
2. When cutting the grids, most of them work well but some of them are not cut through. I checked it and found that there were a lot of rough fibers in all the places that were not cut through, which might be the reason.
   

Actually, I made the small box first to verify my sketch and structure, but I forgot to take photos. Anyway, the small version works well. So I continue the plan to make the large one. But, there was a mistake in one piece when drawing the sketch of the big box, and I didn’t realize it until the laser cutting was done. As a result, the size of that piece is not perfect, but the connection of the other four pieces was still in my plan.