This week we had a few options for our final project: make a gear train or do an independent project as long as it involved using the CNC machine to make a mold and then cast the final product. For my project, I decided to take on the independent project and do something of newfound interest to me; data visualization.

In short, this project is a physical representation of who in Houston has the ability to vote. The zip codes in Houston were split into quintiles by voter registration and normalized by population.

The project started by collecting the voter registration information for everybody in Houston that was registered to vote and deleting the personal information to simply look at how many occurrences of each zip code there were. From there, this information was brought into a program called ArcGIS which allows for the creation of custom maps. ArcGIS allowed me to map the zip codes, join the voter registration data, and then normalize by population per zip code. I was able to export this as an Adobe Illustrator file so I could later manipulate the vectors.

From there, I brought the map into a plane in Rhinoceros 5, a 3D surface modeling program and extruded each piece to different heights depending on the quintile of voter registration. The method in which I did this (creating a bunch of individual objects instead of one solid piece) turned out to be a mistake since I had to spend several hours joining all of the pieces together, but eventually I was able to create a one piece solid model of the finished product.

From there, this model was subtracted from a box and inverted to create the model of the mold needed to create this model. I then brought this model into an Autodesk Program called Fusion360 to create the toolpath and G-Code for the CNC machine.

From there I was able to use the G-Code with our CNC machine to begin milling the mold.

Unfortunately, the project was taking forever to cut, so I paused the CNC machine at 1:30 in the morning to get some rest and when I came back a few hours later, the bit would no longer spin. I ended up casting from the partly finished mold with Smooth-on Silica 950 and Dragonskin.