Assignment 2: Puzzle Design

• For our second assignment I was in charge of designing a puzzle: interlocking pieces that could connect with one another. Ever since I went to Ecuador I have been just enchanted with trees, and I am obsessed with math as well. I really wanted to make a tree that grew shapes instead of leaves.
  
  As you can see my tree turned out quite great, but not before lots of struggle. First off I had to design the layout of the pieces. I sketched on a sticky note some circles and that was it for strategy, which inevitably led to:
  

  

  But before I got here I spent a good 6 hours learning Solid Works so I could make perfect notches. It didn't work, I needed to do more tutorials before I could have gotten that programming working. So I used flash, which is NOT supposed to be a CAD program but the interface was so friendly that I was able to design above in less than 30 minutes.
  
  That said, the CAD file produced confused the laser cutter, and the cutter went over all the lines twice. I would like to experiment with that a bit more.
  
  I then tried a .png file, and the laser cutter started cutting through my tree half way through the sketch.
  
  Then I decided to use cad.py instead of Unbuntu which worked pretty well. My circles were pixelated, which was a small problem, only because I want to see the true power of the laser.
  
  When my pieces were cut out, I found out that the gaps were too small, they couldn't fit on eachother. I had made my notch .145 inches, which was the proven standard, but the notches were much smaller. This was because the PNG file averages color densities for the items in flash so there were gray pixels. All of those were labeled as black in CAD.
  
  So I re-readjusted my file (enlarged it) and it worked out great.
  
  In the future I would like to make sure that I have a high pixels-inch so that the resolution is awsome. I'd also like to try to use vector base images. Furthermore, I would like to put different laser depths so that I can etch things into the leaves, like smiley faces and bark.
  
  Overall, I'm really proud of my design. People have told me I should make a bunch of them and surround my office with them. I'm thinking about makeing a tree for each season and spray painting the cardboard appropriately. Think white glitter for Winter.