Very good Sir!
Thank you for pioneering that process, and documenting the work!
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Thanks for the compliments everyone! For me, it was about designing something I’m going to need, forcing me to start getting comfortable with Fusion 360 and 123D Make, and about documenting the process so that I’ll remember how I did it when the next widget comes along. For others, I thought it would help some of you start thinking through your own projects and give you a place to start digging in in these programs.
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Tag it with “Tutorial” at the very least. It’s a full blown “How-To”.
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What am I missing? It won’t let me add “tutorial” as a tag. It will only let me pick from a short list of tags.
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Well…I dunno! It won’t let me do it either. Curioser and curioser! 
Click to the right of the current tag and start typing. It will attempt to match any existing tags, but will allow you to type anything you like.
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Not this time???
it will be interesting to see how this turns out. Will the artwork look “normal” while looking at it “straight on” but show some parallax because of the angle/curve if you look at it while rotating? Does it even matter as far as how the finished product looks? Not asking you directly, just laying the question out there.
For the less 3D modeling inclined, maybe casting a block of silicone rubber and physically setting a shot glass into it would work for a quick cradle making method.
Or a single layer of balsa wood with the 2D pattern cut out, then placed upon spacers to get the work piece within the laser focus range. Single layer of cardboard would probably work just as well, its stiffness can be taken care of with cardboard bracing underneath. Since we can use the laser to cut everything, consistent spacing is not a problem.
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I believe that the issue is that discourse only allows certain tags to be used under certain forum categories/headings. I would perhaps edit this post and then create another new post under Project Inspiration that contains the tutorial aspect.
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Wonder who came up with that one? (Can’t say I understand the logic behind it, but it would certainly explain the trouble doing it.)
I am a little concerned about parallax issues and such. For the one design I have in mind right now, I don’t think it will be a big problem as the design is not very wide. But I’m sure I’ll come up with other designs where this could be a concern.
Or perhaps it’s a trust level thing about what discourse user trust level is allowed to create new tags for a category.
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Yeah, it had something to do with the category. I changed it to Project Inspiration and was able to tag it as a tutorial.
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What you have is a cylindrical projection. There’s gotta be software out there that will do that conversion. (I know there’s software that does the equivalent conversion for the egg-bot where you have a spherical or elliptical object but a rectangular canvas.)
Essentially you are going to have to squeeze all your vertices by 1/(1-sin(theta)), where theta is the angle of the glass surface (and can be calculated from the distance from centerline but I can’t think and type that fast). And any bitmaps will have to be segmented and squeezed in sections. But. Because people look at cylinders from one point, you may get something that looks better by splitting the difference between proper squeeze and unsqueezed.
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GREAT!!! write up showing your whole process love it and thank you
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This is super cool! Looks like it will work to me.
Let me know if you’d like me to move this back to Free Laser Designs, where it would be a great fit. Tags mystify me too.
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Thanks @dan! I couldn’t decide if it fit better on Project Inspiration or Free Laser Designs. I’m fine with it being in either category.
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Just confirm you want me to do it for you, since putting it there implies that you give permission per the license at the top.
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Yes, I give you permission to move this post back to Free Laser Designs.
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