Perforated Front Panel

The engineers at the client company were resistive to the laser cut perforated panel specified in the original design, and instead asked for an option that used a CNC controlled singular punch. I was asked to perform an exploration on this with the goal of maintaining design intent with the new process.

I first attempted to perform the exploration manually in Solidworks. However, I soon realized that this method was too inefficient and would therefore take far too long to generate a sufficient number of concepts.

To increase the speed of my exploration, I wrote a program in C to generate point clouds driven by various mathematical functions. These point clouds, in turn, drove the placement of the individual hex perforations.

The client engineers then decided that the hexagon corners would cause excessive wear on the tool and the CNC punch would take too long during manufacturing. They asked for an option with a cluster punch and circular/round holes, leading to the above exploration.

Following my work with the perforations, I was asked to specify the LED type and voltage for the front panel and logo lighting. I created the above mock-up to help with this decision.

After a few breakthroughs on the engineering side, the hex pattern was once again on the table, provided that the corners be filleted slightly to avoid tool wear. The cluster punch patterns were still needed to reduce manufacturing time. The final design is shown above.