For my notebook I wanted the cover to have a nice, elegant style border so I searched for different styles of clip art and eventually made the left picture as my cover. For the back I wanted something interesting as well and decided the coolest thing to make with the laser would be a check board on the back cover. This really required no research or preparation so I began to work in Illustrator.
After moving the files to the UCP and cutting them out of pink and black mat board, here's the cut product.
And here's the final assembly of the notebook
Overall this project went very well. The design and cutting was quick and painless. The only issue with my notebook is I would change the corner designs of the front of the notebook from cutting to just engraving. The cut ended up making black, burnt particles that were smeared on the front a bit. The engrave would've been prettier and easier. The other mistake I made with this project is with the front I input a thickness that was smaller than it should've been because I was using the caliper incorrectly, but I worked it out after the first cut.
Water Bottle
This project I made as a present for my girlfriend because her birthday was 3 days ago and I want to keep the surprises coming. It's a pretty basic project but since this is IDEA class, it takes 3 years in order to get it done. After drawing the file I put in the spinning jig and clicked print after alignment. Pretty basic stuff. My planning for this consisted of reading through the instructions and filing out the math for the surface area.
Here's the file for the water bottle and the finished project next to it.
Thingverse
As if this rotation needs another project, here's Thingiverse! I chose a cardboard box to hold a candle. I downloaded it off of Thingiverse as an Illustrator file already and won't have to make any modifications for printing, only changing stroke size to .0001 and making sure the red was RGB. The intricate little cuts of the candle holder made it appeal to me and it turned out alright and wasn't too hard to put together. The actual project was very fragile and didn't hook together too well, but it does it's job nicely.
This rotation was good for getting me comfortable with Illustrator a little, which will help with the Vinyl unity, with the UCP, and the laser itself. Everything is basic and the only important thing is knowing the order of what to do before you hit play to make sure it cuts and doesn't set the lab on fire. The laser is a very powerful and fun tool which doesn't require that much effort to use because the software and hardware does 90% of the work for you! Making cool and useful projects with awesome designs is both easy and interesting now!