It was a good week for failures. I purchased some insulation foam and learned how to use the router in Foisie to cut out the shapes for my mold. Unfortunately, router workspace was not tall enough to be able to cut through 2″ of foam and still clear the stock when moving above the part. We did not know this prior to cutting, so the first iteration came out poorly.

I decided that it would still work to simply cut 1.5″ through the 2″ stock and hack through the rest with a knife, because that would still be way easier than cutting through the full height. Cutting the curved profile was the most important part, because I did not want to do that by hand. I wanted to put a large fillet on the top profile, but we struggled to create the toolpath in an efficient manner. The software would only cut the fillet with a raster pattern. Rastering the front (smaller) portion of the animal took a long time, so I decided to scrap that operation and only cut the profile on the larger back portion.

My silliest failure this week was when cutting the back part of the mold, I completely forgot to screw down the material. For miraculous reasons, the first two passes did not move the material at all, so I didn’t notice. It moved immediately after starting the third pass, but thankfully did not destroy the part. I decided to just cut out the rest with a knife, because it would be impossible to place the stock exactly aligned with the origin of the first cut. Misalignment would risk destroying the geometry.

To create the curved top surface, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea of using a vegetable peeler to take off small slices. This strategy did not work at all. The peeler simply tore off chunks of the foam instead of cutting through the material. I may need to purchase a hot wire cutter, or simply do a lot of sanding.

Fairy Lights

I received my NeoPixel fairy lights! I set them up as instructed and ran the test program. Nothing happened. This was because I plugged the LEDs into the wrong output on my Arduino Nano. They work fine.

Next week I will work on creating the fade pattern, and making sure my power will work out. I was also unable to acquire the dangly bits I wanted from the dollar store, so I will make a pilgrimage to the craft store this weekend.