My old lamp at home broke so I needed a new lamp to place next to my bed, so I decided to build a lamp using Fusion and Lightburn. At first, I wanted to make a simple cube with a lightbulb inside as the final design, but decided to add extra details to make it more unique. After all the planning, I split my lamp into three parts: a top bit, the base, and the  supporting bit. The top bit is where the light bulb will be placed, the supporting bit is what helps support the top bit to connect with the base, and the base bit is the base of the lamp. I first used Fusion to draw each panels, and used Lightburn to send and laser cut, with a wood length of 5mm. I wanted my lamp to look simple and modern so I added simple shapes on the top bit such as stars, apples, Korean flag, etc. However, when I made my first cardboard design I found out how some of my pieces didn’t match accurately and my Korean flag looked bad after printing. So I worked really hard for 3 lessons to fix my calculations and replaced the Korean flag with a smiley face. After I made sure that everything was going to work out after I print it with wood, I exported my panels from fusion to lightburn. I colored all my panels red so they would all be cut out and sent my design to the technicians to for printing. After receiving my printed wood panels, I made sure nothing was wrong with the shapes on the panels, and started gluing them together for 2 lessons straight. Luckily, they were all perfectly calculated by me and fit flawlessly. However, after I placed my light bulb in and glued the top piece, I realized that I might have to take the lightbulb out in the future when it’s broken. So I took the top piece out and instead used a magnet to connect the top piece so I can take the bulb out (Thank you Mr Diego). Another problem was that the bolt that I screwed in was sticking out from the bottom and did not make my lamp look good. So Mrs. Kim helped me get rid of it using a cool but dangerous tool. And I screwed a new bolt sticking up so that it was hidden. After that, I was finally done with my lamp. Overall, I’m totally satisfied with my work, but something that i’m disappointed about it was that I didn’t have time to color it.

 

In this project, I thoroughly used most of the skills I learned in Fusion, such as the spline tool, circular pattern tool, rectangular pattern tool, mirror tool, etc. Especially the circular pattern tool was very useful for all the panels that I made. Moreover, I enjoyed drawing the apple and smiley face shapes with the spline tool and it was super cool drawing other stuff as well. Although I didn’t face any problems when using Fusion to draw my panels out, I did spend a lot of time adjusting the panels sizes and drawing out the apple shape with the spline tool that was hard to use because i wanted the apple to look good. I remember spending almost 30 minutes to adjust the overall shape of the apple. After I finished drawing all the panels, I moved on to Lightburn which was super easy because I just had to color all the panels red because they all had to be cut out.

As an advice to incoming students, I believe the key thing about Fusion is patience. Because Fusion does crash a lot and it takes time to learn and it is important to stay patient while learning. Unlike me I was very impatient whenever I faced a problem or when Fusion crashed, and it just made everything worse. If I retake this subject again, I would try to stay patient while learning and acknowledge that learning a whole new software is a hard process. Overall, each class was a fun and difficult experience and I feel like I learned a lot from it. But one thing I would like to change if I were the teacher is that I wouldn’t make my students use the macbook for Fusion and instead use a better PC because it crashes a lot.