CS 294-3: RAPID PROTOTYPING
Lecture #2 -- Sep. 8, 2000.

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Preparing a CAD file for SFF

How do we communicate with those machines ?
The design process.
Interactive and Procedural CAD tools.
Interchange formats
.STL (defacto default)
SIF_SFF (later).

A First Procedural Design

Introduction to SLIDE (by Jane Yen)
Sweeps
Knots
Make a solid knot
Make an STL file
Run the machine

Discussion of Findings in Assignment A#1

What did you find on the web ?
Q&A about "Use of Solid Rapid Prototyping"

Homework Assignment:

A#2: Design a Solid Knot to be built with FDM

Use the sweep construct in SLIDE to make a closed (knotted) path.
Choose an interesting but not too complex/detailed cross section, and sweep it along the path.
Convince yourself that the resulting structure
- - has no self-intersections,
- - has a bounding box of not more than 10 cubic inch in volume,
- - fills that box only very loosely, i.e., does not consume too much material,
- - has no thin walls less than 2mm thick.
Save file in .STL format, and save it in a public_html directory.
Capture a screen image of your sculpture, and print it out.

Bring to next class the image of your sculpture, with the URL of where we can find the .STL file.

Extra Credit

Veryfy / recompute line one in the table that discusses accuracy of polyhedral (icosahedral) sphere approaximation, and determine how many triangles are needed to obtain a 1% chord accuracy on the sphere.