Dec 04

Is Inkscape good for Laser Cutting

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I have got fascinated with those laser cut “abstract line pattern” designs with just random intersecting lines and rounded corners. Can I do one myself? How?

It is easy to make one with vertical and horizontal intersecting lines. I can make one in OpenSCad in a few minutes. I can also rotate lines randomly in OpenSCad. But rounded corners? I can round corners of an objects. How do I round object intersections? maybe there is a way.
In a meantime, I decided to look at Inkscape. I am completely new to it. I watched a quick educational video, and then in one hour I came up with this:

design
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Nov 23

Suction Cup Holder

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Is 3D printer a toy or is it useful?
Well, if you are building another 3D printer or something like that, you can print those parts.
But is it useful for anything in the “real world”? Cannot you just buy whatever you need off the shelf?
Most of the time you do. But sometimes 3D printer is really handy.
I had a shower shelf that did not stay in place – it travels left and right. There was 1 suction cup coming with it, but it was not enough to secure it in place.
Not just because 1 is not enough. Whoever designed it just did not think it through.
So I have bought more suction cups on Amazon. However, they did not fit.
I could of keep buying other ones hoping that I will eventually figure out how to use them to secure the shelf in place.
But why if I have a 3D printer?

I measured everything and drew this design in OpenSCad:

3

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Jul 25

Large spoon

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I had stressful last few weeks at work – things were not working as expected and blocking other people, and I was trying to solve it. Blocking other people stresses me out a lot. In the end I figured thing out and order is restored. But stress was still there? What is the best cure for the stress? Meditation and woodworking.

What do you you if you have a bigger stress? Well, you just carve a larger spoon.

spoon1

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May 23

Looking for anomalies

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When you run some process, there are two ways to look for anomalies – “white box” and “black box”. First one uses some knowledge about the process. Perhaps, you are already doing that. But comprehensive white box analysis is very expensive, so it is easy to overlook something. How about doing black box analysis on top of it?

I wrote some software that does black box search for anomalies in a series of images. It does Fourier transform, crops the low frequency part, calculates average, and then calculates distance from the average for each image.

Here is the focus sweep for the bug:

plot2

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