So for this project we were required to make a maze. In summary we first had to sketch out our maze in Inventor then transfer it into a software program called Fusion 360 and then save it on a flash drive to transfer it onto the CnC Router to cut it out. Before I even began to sketch and plan my maze and looked around on the internet to get a few ideas on what I wanted my maze to look like. After I had a rough idea of what I wanted, I started to sketch out my maze.
Inventor & Illustrator
I wanted to keep my maze simple when I was sketching it in Inventor. I started out with 11 x 8.5 x .75 platform for my maze. After this I went through and added in the main channels before going back and adding in the extra channels and pathways. Once I had all of the channels that I wanted, I dimension them to a width of 5/16th of an inch and extruded them to a depth of 1/4th of an inch. Then before I transferred my finished maze from Inventor to Fusion 360, I quickly went into Illustrator and drew my name and hour. For both our maze and brake part we needed to engrave our name and hour into our projects. The process for engraving into foam was a little different than normal but I'll explain that process on a different page.
Fusion 360
Now that I had my maze completed in Inventor, my next step was to upload my maze into Fusion 360. Once it was upload I selected 2-D Contour and begin to set up the settings in order to cut it out. After all this was completed I saved the G-code to my flash drive and transferred it to the Router.
Final Result
In the end my maze turned out better than I thought it would. I didn't have any problems when using the CnC Router and it only took about five or so minutes for my maze to cut out.
Summary
During this project I learned how to use Fusion 360 and how to run the CnC Router. While the CnC Router wasn't too hard to learn, the one I struggled with the most was trying to learn how to use Fusion 360. Overall though after a few trial and error runs I finally got the hang of how to use this new software. Through this rotation I also learned how important it is to plan ahead just in case things don't go well or if you end up behind on your work. Another thing I learned was what G-Code was and how large the process is for the CnC Router to just cut out a single maze.