Lasercutters are amazingly versatile tools that can help you build all manner of complicated structures if you can break them down into a series of planar parts. [David] had spotted artworks at the Smithsonian which caught his eye, using planar shapes with interesting repeating patterns. Wanting to make similar works himself, he set out to create software to help make it possible.
The result of [David]’s work is the Polygonia Design Suite. It’s a tool that aims to make creating geometric patterns for lasercutting easy and simple. The web interface designer has a wide variety of options for drawing shapes and patterns, and the frame size can also be controlled. [David] demonstrates these features with all manner of creations. The project’s Instagram page features basic rectangular panels with inset cubic and triangular motifs, all the way up to an ornate octahedron built from many panels held together with 3D printed clips.
It’s all whipped up in Javascript, handrolled CSS and HTML. Cloud storage and authentication is all handled via Amazon Web Services, which makes handling such features easy. [David] made a special effort to create a separate test site so code experiments won’t effect the live site – crucial for any commercial endeavor.
If you’re in the mood to create some geometric lasercut artworks, check out the tool online. The first 3 exports are free, with a variety of subscription models available for heavy users. We fully expect to see an explosion in fancy lasercut homewares at the weekend markets in years to come.
If your thirst for lasercut art isn’t yet satiated, check out this colorful edgelit acrylic technique.
I think this would be nice source for patterns to etch with the NEJE DK-8-KZ.
Played around in the software for an hour. This is really cool, but for the life of me, I can’t delete a line. The help says to select both endpoints and press delete, but that does nothing in Chrome or Firefox.
Try backspace instead. Worked fine for me.
Thanks for the tip, backspace works perfectly to delete a line!
website looks pretty messed up here on Firefox in Ubuntu, image gallery is super slow to change pics
Does paid software usually get a front page headline, or is this a special favor?
@Languager
Thats was my though after reading this article.
There are plenty of ways of producing laser cut geometric patterns, I can think of at least 3
OpenSCAD
OpenJSCad
Maker.JS
Of these 3 Maker.JS is the only one which allows creation of unterminated / unclosed splines
There are also other procedural CAD packages, which are free or open source which have a GUI, so that you can probably edit your creation after the algorithm has finish..
BTW. I had to laugh, when at the line “with a variety of subscription models available for heavy users”
I can’t think of a commercial business which would be a heavy user of this service.
the website lets you 3 downloads for free and then pay per download. the hackaday.io entry is basically an ad. no source, just 3 lines of text and pretty pictures. I guess you don’t want to encourage this kind of thing.
Wow, the time that would take to make and put together, That is some pretty amazing software i will look deeper into it this weekend, thanks for showing us.