Stroking a stroke for laser cutting

Programming Questions

sdenvers

Stroking a stroke for laser cutting

in Programming Questions • 11 months ago

Hi,

I have written a simple program which generates a random snowflake style thing on screen. The idea is kids can generate their own unique snowflake and it gets cut out from an attached laser cutter.

I built the flakes as a series of line statements with a rotate after each branch is built.

for (int i=0; i<6; i++) {
line(0,0,0,mainstalkLength);
int frondSeparation=stalkLength / numFronds;
int frondStart=20;
int newfrondLength=frondLength;
// decorate
for (int z=0; z<numFronds; z++) {
line(0, 0, stalkLength, 0);
//LHS
line(frondStart, 0, frondStart+frondAngle, newfrondLength);
//RHS
line(frondStart, 0, frondStart+frondAngle, -newfrondLength);
frondStart+=frondSeparation;
newfrondLength=int(newfrondLength*frondDecay);
}
rotate(PI/3);
}

I'm using the following to alter the thickness and styling of the above lines.

strokeCap(strokeCap_);
strokeJoin(strokeCap_);
strokeWeight(strokeWeight_);

Unfortunately when output as pdf this is no good to the laser cutter as it wants a cut line to follow, i.e. a stroke of the stroke.

Rather than rewriting my program to output laser ready lines (i.e. manually achieve what the stroke commands are doing for me), is there a way to take the generated image and somehow apply a further stroke to the whole thing, so the PDF can be sent straight to the cutter? I'm expecting a no, but you never know.

I can post the whole thing if it's useful. It's quick and dirty...

Thanks,
Simon

Replies(4)

PhiLho

Re: Stroking a stroke for laser cutting

11 months ago

Probably not...

Jesse Sco..

Re: Stroking a stroke for laser cutting

11 months ago

Not really answering your question, but...

I've done a similar project, but I use V3GA's blobDetection library to take an image or webcam feed and do a contour detection on it (you could also pass it a generated image)... then I customize a GCode file that I send to a laser cutter...

If it helps, this topic has some leads (as well as links to my source code and some other libs...)

v.k.

Re: Stroking a stroke for laser cutting

11 months ago

I' sure is not just a stupid thing like drawing again thiner and with the same color of the background.

void setup() {

size (400, 400);

strokeCap(ROUND);

strokeJoin(ROUND);

background(255);

stroke(0);

strokeWeight(4);

line(20,height/2, width-20, height/2);

stroke(255);

strokeWeight(2);

line(20,height/2, width-20, height/2);

}

sdenvers

Re: Stroking a stroke for laser cutting

11 months ago

Thanks for the replies.

v.k., your idea sort of works but the image I build is made up from many overlapping stroked lines so the snowflake would not be in one piece at the end of the cutting process. The elements which make up the snowflake would need union'ing somehow. I did try geomerative briefly and could union objects together, but couldn't produce anything other than a blank pdf. Maybe I was doing something wrong.

Jesse, interesting idea and nice site. I've downloaded the BlobDetection library and had a quick look. Basically I am going to have to dump a jpg and trace it in Coreldraw or something, apply a contour and remove the original image. So roughly what you have suggested but a manual process for now.

Or I will rewrite it if I have time before Saturday. When I set out (with my limited Processing knowledge) I thought there'd be a simple way of union'ing the objects together and applying a stroke to the resulting image. And hey, maybe just somehow send it to the laser cutter so you just generate something on screen, press a button and out it pops. But it seems not!

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