____       _          ____                        
|  _ \ ___ | |__   ___/ ___| _   _ _ __ ___   ___  
| |_) / _ \| '_ \ / _ \___ \| | | | '_ ` _ \ / _ \ 
|  _ < (_) | |_) | (_) |__) | |_| | | | | | | (_) |
|_| \_\___/|_.__/ \___/____/ \__,_|_| |_| |_|\___/ 
                                                   
  ____            _    _                 _    
 / ___|___   ___ | | _| |__   ___   ___ | | __
| |   / _ \ / _ \| |/ / '_ \ / _ \ / _ \| |/ /
| |__| (_) | (_) |   <| |_) | (_) | (_) |   < 
 \____\___/ \___/|_|\_\_.__/ \___/ \___/|_|\_\

Laser cutting and Inkscape - drawing and submitting your design

General

• All pieces will be cut from flat sheets of 3 mm plywood (or sometimes acrylic, depending on availability of materials).
• An automated submission system for RoboSumo laser cutting designs is currently in development. Pending its completion, please email your SVG files to me (Ted Burke) for cutting.
• Although laser cutting is much faster than 3-D printing, it still takes time. Do not expect your design to be cut and returned to you immediately - there will generally be a delay of several days between submitting your drawing and receiving your cut pieces. For example, if you submit a drawing on Friday, there's a good chance you'll get it back the following Wednesday.

Requirements for submitting your designs

• All drawings submitted for laser cutting must be Inkscape SVG files. Other file formats will not be accepted.
• Drawings should contain no elements other than thin black lines where the laser will cut. Drawings should contain no other elements - no text labels, no colours, no filled shapes.
• The maximum page size for submitted drawings is 600 x 300 mm, because our Epilog laser cutter cannot accommodate sheets of material larger than this. In practice, a margin of at least 5mm should be left free of cutting on all sides of the sheet - i.e. all drawn lines should fit within a rectangle 590 x 290 mm. Judging by previous semesters, most designs fit comfortably into a much smaller area than this.

Guidance on using Inkscape

I've created a basic Inkscape cheat sheet that you might find useful:

• Inkscape laser cutting cheat sheet

I've also recorded the following video, which includes a complete worked example of drawing a design for laser cutting in Inkscape:

The steps shown in the video to set up an Inkscape document for laser cutting are summarised below:

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+D to open “Document Properties”.
2. Set “Display units” to “mm”.
3. Under “Page size”, in the “custom size” panel, set width to 600 mm and height to 300 mm.
4. Close Document Properties.
5. Press Ctrl+Shift+P to open Inkscape’s “Preferences” dialog.
6. In the “Tools” section (which should be visible when the dialog opens) select “Geometric bounding box”.
7. Close the Preferences dialog.

Useful files

• Standard RoboSumo wheel - If you want to fit something onto the shaft of one of the yellow motors, you might find it useful to copy-paste the centre hole from our standard laser cut wheel.