Vasu Agrawal : LED Lit Baymax

This project produced a nice lasercut silhouette of Baymax. In addiction, more holes were added for the armor, embedding one inside the other. In order to maintain a largely landscape aspect ratio, the logo for the movie was also added on the side.

From the beginning, it was clear that there were going to be many, many dots: many more than are amenable to manipulation in SolidWorks. Instead, a vector based drawing program was used, called Inkscape. Inkscape, in combination with Adobe Photoshop and www.rasterbator.net were used to trace the silhouette of Baymax, and then obtain a halftoned version of Baymax with his armor on. Getting the halftone just right in Photoshop took a significant amount of iteration: continually tweaking the contrast, brightness, and overall lightness of the red vs blue in order to finally arrive at a solution that gave a result that was amenable when put through the Rasterbator. After obtaining a PDF from Rasterbator, the image was opened in Inkscape, converted to a vector, and then masked with the silhouetted image that was created earlier.

Here are the step-by-step directions to get a satisfactory result:

1. Trace silhouette of Baymax without armor (in black and white), as well as one of Baymax with his armor on, and compose them to get the shape of the final image.
2. Convert image of Baymax with armor to greyscale, with reds and blues roughly equivalent.
3. Use Rasterbator to get a dots version of the above image, making sure to use the proper scale.
4. Join all of the circles from Rasterbation, and then intersect that with the created silhouette.
5. Convert SVG to DXF via EPS and pstoedit
6. Color in DraftSight as necessary, making sure to set the scale to be inches.
7. Cut the piece out, poke out any remaining pieces, and then create a wooden frame.
8. Wrap LEDs inside the wooden frame, and add necessary electronics.
9. Plug in and enjoy!