Sozotron Robots : A Designer/Art Toy Story

Fabulous work.

I sure hope you keep a full set for yourself!

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These are great! All the time and energy you put into them is readily apparent!

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I think these pieces are amazing.

Despite your pain, the level of detail on such a small scale looks absolutely excellent.

I love the internal electrics driving the lighting. I think the way you incorporated tongues and tabs into the aesthetic part of the design is great.

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This is amazing

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Wow, what a labor of love! They are so appealing. I hope you do well with them.

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Thank you so much for detailing and sharing your experience. Your story is similar to so many in the inventor/artist/maker community. Consumers need to be reminded of the hours and hours of work necessary to bring an idea to life and maybe to store shelves. Your labor of love resulted in some fantastic robots with truly unique features. Perhaps it is not feasible to bring them to the mass market today, but I suspect that key elements of your learning experience will contribute to your future successes. It is interesting to consider the many ways that a Glowforge has entered into business plans in the few years that it has existed. This forum has introduced me to some truly gifted artists and engineers that I would never have bumped into in my normal everyday life. Please continue to share your artistic adventures when you have the time.

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Very nice work. These are amazingly detailed and adorable.

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Incredible work! Your persistence is paying off for sure.

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Amazing upgrade to the old tin robots! Really great work, thanks for sharing. :slight_smile:

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This is an amazing work! Well done!

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Those are so cool!

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Wow ! Just wow!

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What amazing work! Truly a labor of love! You have added such incredible detail, they are just fabulous!

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Sorry for the late reply! Thanks to all for taking the time to view my project and for your kind words! Heres a few behind the scenes work in progress shots of the madness, lol! One thing I learned for sure on this Glowforge/laser journey, I HATE WEEDING!!! :rofl: :sob:

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@eflyguy Thank you, I did indeed! :wink:

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@sqw Thanks for noticing the tongue and tab detail! It definitely was intentional.

@dklgood Thank you so much! Well I’m glad I’m not alone in the “struggle”! And yes, while I do think most consumers can and do appreciate the effort, I do think they need a reminder from time to time. I too am hopeful that the lessons learned with this project will help carry me forward with future projects. But I’m pretty sure there are even more lessons ahead :wink:

Thanks again everyone! :slightly_smiling_face:

Wow…that’s a lot of robots. You have really been busy . :blush:

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Those are really cute! (I missed it the first time around.)

You did great with the double sided registration, but there might be an easier way to do it…tutorial here:

Centering the designs around the vertical center axis is critical, but the addition of a weeding cut around unusual shapes makes it easy to do the engraving on both sides before cutting out the shape.
(I did that with the two sided carousel horses, and they are a very irregular shape.) But do a small weeding rectangle around each cut, don’t try to flip the whole batch over at once. That would be hard to align well.

Alternatively, especially for arms and legs, put two copies of the design side by side, but flip one. Then for the next pass, you switch the two out and just engrave the same pattern as it is already set up.

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I am stunned…

this is a truly amazing effort with a fabulous outcome.

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@Jules Thank you so much for posting your tutorial! Despite your initial post dating back before I started my project, unfortunately I somehow missed it! That said, I’m happy to say I was able to reach most of the same conclusions and methods during my own “struggles”. As you’ve stated, I learned in my initial attempts that doing large batches and keeping them in register on the flip was going to be a problem. The more pieces I attempted to process all at once, the more alignment errors there were. Over time I would cut that number down and the ratio would get better, but it was still hit and miss and not a good ratio for any kind of “production”. While singular pieces had a better success rate, I felt that processing parts one at a time would be way to slow and time consuming to babysit. In my mind I felt like “it should just work!!!”, so I was adamant about doing them in smaller batches at the very least. In hindsight, I should have realized and/or accepted that this was a limitation of the GF and worked within that limitation rather than fighting against it. It would have required more hands on attention, but I may have had more successful pieces and far less scrap? Still, processing pieces one at a time isnt perfect either, at least in my experience. There would be times when the artwork in the UI would shift slightly after opening and closing the lid to flip a piece. More often than not, it would turn out fine if I proceeded with the second side, but not always. Which always left me hesitant and second guessing whether or not processing the second side would just be a huge waste of time? And sometimes it was.

Moving forward, I think I’ll try to come up with designs that don’t require a two sided engrave or just accept it will only be single sided. But odds are I’ll still want something two sided and so I’ll just have to proceed with greater patience and make them one at a time.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply and for sharing your great tutorial!!!

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