> To add a little pizzazz, I constructed a cat’s head silhouette from an ellipse and two triangles, then randomly scattered them
Ooh! A scattering that avoids overlapping punching might benefit from another recent item on Poisson Disk Scattering [0]... Although on a boringly-practical level, I guess rejection sampling would make more sense for this need.
Like some of the other older pre-TNP-mitigation plugins it's possible its interaction with those mitigations is quite limited, though my limited understanding is some work has gone into extending the mitigations into objects generated by the Python API in the next version of FreeCAD (26.3 — CalVer now).
Can anyone recommend a home CO2 or high-wattage diode laser cutter which can cut 3-4mm ply? We run a large commercial Epilog machine at my local makerspace, but I wonder if consumer machines have gotten reasonably good recently?
My 50W Omtech Polar Plus (since discontinued) can do 3mm in one pass and 6mm in two passes (or one pass near max power but I prefer two for reduced charring and to extend the lifecycle of the laser).
Basically any 50W Chinese laser should get you what you want. But at that price point you can't adjust the mirrors, no red dot to guide cuts, poor camera calibration etc. It's worlds away from what I expect you get with an Epilog.
I found that Figma is really good for designing SVG laser cuttable designs. Had to fix a few things with exports, units etc. but solid. Here's a little plugin I built if it's helpful:
I'm actually rather fond of OpenSCAD --- it has the advantage of being completely safe in terms of security/execution, so no worries about downloading a random .scad file and wondering what it might do.
If one wants a full-fledge programming language for this, I found Python a lot more comfortable:
For my part, I've been working the CNC router angle, so have a much larger kerf to cope with (and the added advantage of controllable partial depth and no char):
I do something similar: trace a rectangle and subdivide it into 20 smaller rectangles. Then I slide the smaller rectangles to one side. The part that's missing (divided by 19) is the kerf.
Ooh! A scattering that avoids overlapping punching might benefit from another recent item on Poisson Disk Scattering [0]... Although on a boringly-practical level, I guess rejection sampling would make more sense for this need.
https://github.com/execuc/LCInterlocking
Like some of the other older pre-TNP-mitigation plugins it's possible its interaction with those mitigations is quite limited, though my limited understanding is some work has gone into extending the mitigations into objects generated by the Python API in the next version of FreeCAD (26.3 — CalVer now).
Basically any 50W Chinese laser should get you what you want. But at that price point you can't adjust the mirrors, no red dot to guide cuts, poor camera calibration etc. It's worlds away from what I expect you get with an Epilog.
https://www.heyraviteja.com/post/portfolio/laser-cuts/
Roughly similar capabilities, but you get to use javascript or typescript instead of the linguistic abomination that is OpenSCAD.
If one wants a full-fledge programming language for this, I found Python a lot more comfortable:
https://pythonscad.org/
https://boxes.hackerspace-bamberg.de/
For my part, I've been working the CNC router angle, so have a much larger kerf to cope with (and the added advantage of controllable partial depth and no char):
https://community.carbide3d.com/t/full-blind-box-joints-in-c...
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
[0]www.onshape.com [1]www.sendcutsend.com