What is it about?

Getting laser-cut mechanisms, such as those in microscopes, robots, vehicles, etc., to work, requires all their components to be dimensioned precisely. This precision, however, tends to be lost when fabricating on a different laser cutter, as it is likely to remove more or less material (aka "kerf"). We address this with what we call kerf-canceling mechanisms. Kerf-canceling mechanisms replace laser-cut bearings, sliders, gear pairs, etc. Unlike their traditional counterparts, however, they keep working when manufactured on a different laser cutter and/or with different kerf. Kerf-canceling mechanisms achieve this by adding an additional wedge element per mechanism. We have created a software tool KerfCanceler that locates traditional mechanisms in cutting plans and replaces them with their kerf-canceling counterparts.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

KerfCanceler, together with SpringFit (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3332165.3347930), allows users to produce any laser cut model on any laser cutter. Many models are being shared on online repositories like thingiverse, grabCAD, thangs... but the fact that the models may not work when fabricated on a different laser cutter is a bit of a show-stopper given that every laser cutter is slightly different (even if the difference is just the lens being older/less clean). By modifying the model to become independent of the laser cutter, our tools effectively allow other users to fabricate your model too. Similarly, imagine a company that fabricates many laser-cut parts, if they buy a new laser cutter each of the models have to be tested and modified to the new machine. With kerf-canceling mechanism and in particular when combined with springFit (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3332165.3347930), they no longer need to worry and are guaranteed that the models continue to work reliably.

Perspectives

personally, I have been laser cutting a lot throughout my career. The endless times that I tried to cut something that simply didn't work. Even just reproducing a model I made some other time but I cut on slightly different material or with a lens that's a bit off can easily result in a completely failed cut. The frustration is large because you only get to find out at the end, when you try to assemble the pieces. Until then everything looked reasonable. KerfCanceling Mechanisms and SpringFit are my answer to this problem: now I do not need to worry anymore before sending the file to the cutter: it will work.

Thijs Roumen
Hasso Plattner Institute

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Kerf-Canceling Mechanisms, October 2020, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3379337.3415895.
You can read the full text:

Read

Resources

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page