4. Design Guidelines

Design guidelines make sure that designs can be fabricated from the design generated by the designer's code.
One of the core aspects of a design in O-LAP is that it should be able to generate fabrication drawings from the design hosted.

The parts detailed below are great to know while designing an O-LAP, but not essential since the framework takes care of most of it. However we need the designer to provide certain information so that the framework can do its work.

The shapes that have to be cut have to be continuous (does not have any ends) in order to be able to cut and be seperated from the rest of the sheet. Also based on our experience with working with the materials we have determined the following best practices for the designs.

• Avoid inidvidual pieces smaller than 3" in any dimension.
• Avoid weak parts in your design where the design can be susceptible to breaking. This might happen near the groove cuts where the meterial gets narrow and heavy material on both sides.
• Think about weight distribution. While you are free from gravity in the browser, it unfornately can't be avoided in the real world. Having grounded surfaces help the weight distribution.
• CNC fabrication machines are available in multiple sizes. The most common ones we have come across which are easy to access are 8' x 4'. So if your individual pieces are bigger than that, it might get difficult to find a fabricator that can make it.
• If you have any members that are not supported directly on ground, plan your groove directions carefully.