Student found a way to burn PG

One of my current projects has me working with Illustrator, AutoCAD, 3DS Max, and freaking AutoSketch. And half of the files are coming as PDFs instead of native formats! If I hadn’t started with so much hair, I’d have pulled it all out by now.

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Our makerspace is unmonitored - once you take the appropriate operations certification classes you can come in and run whatever you want whenever you want. We do have video monitoring in the event that something bad happens and no one fesses up.

Other ones require supervision - some even have an operator you give your job to.

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These programs do very specific things related to ensuring the geometry meets the requirements of 3D printing (“water tightness”, and other things related to errors in the geometry). Whether or not the geometry itself is something the 3D printing process can manage is usually up to the user to determine.

I suppose if you knew the properties of the material being lasered you could determine if the number of passes in close proximity at a given power level would set the material on fire. But this is something very different from what 3D checking programs do.

There’s a bunch of stuff no one tells you, that you have to figure out for yourself in 3D printing and CNC Machining (I do both of these, laser cutting is a new addition to my toolset). I think this is the kind of thing I’d put in the “learning experience” category. New rule: inspect the file under high magnification to make sure it doesn’t have a lot of really closely spaced lines that only look solid when the view is zoomed out, because a lot of really closely spaced lines will set the material on fire.

As for software to detect this kind of thing, I’d think there’d be a problem with liability. If the GF rated the job as “less likely to set the material on fire” and it did set the material on fire, they’d be in a world of hurt. So GF I suspect would like us to assume everything can catch on fire. Common sense sort of demands this too. The worst that happens with a 3D printer if the software is wrong is that you have scrap plastic to throw away.

IMO, you cannot eliminate this risk. Especially given your stated objectives for allowing access to the GF. So the right solution is to plan for the inevitable. Part of the training for using the GF should include recognizing when something is on fire vs. just being cut, and what to do if something does catch fire (grab extinguisher, open GF, direct extinguisher at area on fire). And of course, a fire extinguisher and a lesson in using it (you don’t want them emptying the entire thing in to the cutter).

I’ve been experimenting with my own materials in my GF. Some different woods, Depron foam, cardboard, Delrin. I assume that I’m going to set stuff on fire. Every time I try something new (with the exception of some Anodized Aluminum). I have a small halon extinguisher for plastics but I plan to use a water spray bottle for wood/paper. So far, knock on wood, I haven’t needed either…

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What about for simple designs, screen cap and doing a raster image cut or engrave?

To me it sounds like you need a static analysis tool to run every file through, we’ll call it LaserLint. It could be a business opportunity for someone here.

As there is no LaserLint I’m aware of, I like the suggestion of “How much time is your job going to take?” You could work out basic guidelines for how long things should take and post them. As you said, and as both a onetime physics and business major I take some offense to, the students who need it the most are the ones who need the simplest tools and are the ones doing the simplest things. A student doing complex things, where your simple guidelines will fail, is going to suffer from mistakes of over confidence anyway and needs a couple of good conflagrations to make him or her a good engineer.

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Thanks for the context and suggestions @hansena . I’ll make sure the team gets them!