mattbell

I spent almost all of Maker Faire behind a booth this year, but it was fun to interact with the various attendees.

 

In addition to the lasercut wood spirals, I brought a few laser-cut paper Hilbert curves for people to play with. 



Every now and then I would invite people to pull one of the Hilbert curves apart.  Because the Hilbert curve is an intricate, long, space-filling curve, a small Hilbert curve can be stretched to quite a length. 

This ~9 year old kid gave a savant-style mathematical definition of a Hilbert curve, so I let him pull the first one apart:



At the end of the day, we pulled apart the remaining ones, including the two big ones:

 


This is unrelated, but was also from maker faire -- a veritable ocean of paella:

I will be in the Techshop area, which is in a side building to the right of the main entrance.  I have THREE new lasercut wood designs to show off, all of which I built in the last three days.  Pictures will show up online soon.

Having exhausted the entire local supply of zebrawood, I've turned to trying some other woods.  As it turns out, lacewood has some very interesting properties.  When cut perpendicular to the surface of the tree rings, you get a fine and even grain pattern that makes it really easy to match any piece to any other piece.  Cuts parallel to the rings look quite different and have a big splotchy appearance.  See the difference here.

Lacewood's performance under different lighting conditions is drastically different.  It's the sort of thing those hardcore Pixar animators like to put in a movie just to show how awesome their graphic skills are, kind of like a modern version of a painter doing a still life.

Here's what I made -- I wanted to have two spirals, one serving as a source and one as a drain.  I tinkered around with configurations until I found one that was as smooth as possible.  Here's what I got:



Here's a video showing just how much it dances in changing light:


Here are some still photos showing what happens when you get a very directional light source on it:

 

I really pushed myself on my latest design.  It was way more complicated than anything I've tried before, and I made some mistakes, but I think it came out well.

Here's a quick video where you can see how it shines under direct light:



In the shade:



What I learned:

- The tiny ( < 1/100") width of the laser cuts is big enough to start affecting the design, causing holes that accumulate as large numbers of pieces are pushed together.  This made it close to impossible to get the whole thing aligned properly.  If you look at the holes up close, you'll see the pieces don't line up properly.
- With designs this complicated, I should switch to a different kind of backing that I can progressively apply as I add more pieces.  Currently, managing the position of 50+ pieces, each lighter than a feather, is an exercise in frustration.

Here's how well it came out compared to the simulation -- I worked to get the centerline aligned with darker material. 



My workflow for producing it ended up being really tedious:

- Autoconversion of high-res bitmap into vector data: 10 minutes.
- Cleaning up vector data: 3 hours
- Converting vectors into pieces to cut, and rotating them: 3 hours.
- Test cutout: 1 hour
- Real cutout and assembly: : 1 hour
- Getting the damn pieces to not overlap so I could glue them: 1 1/2 hours
- Gluing, sanding, fixing, oiling: 1 1/2 hours.

Unfortunately, there isn't much room for improvement except in the last two steps.... unless I decide to reprogram the original setup to do the first three steps automatically.  This likely will take 10-15 hours, but at least I'll be engaging my brain instead of doing tedious work in CorelDraw and Visio.

Some more construction photos:

 

I really liked how my last round of designs came out, and now I'm interesting in trying something more sophisticated.

These spirals are pretty, but I want to create more complex patterns:



Creating more complex patterns of the style I'm envisioning will require some math though.  As a result, I've written some software that allows me to generate vector fields that correspond to various equations of interest.  Some of the equations are inspired by physical phenomena (eg magnetic fields).  Other equations are designed to create stars, spirals, and waves.  I can superimpose these elements to create more complex patterns:

 

The software chops up the field into areas of roughly the same orientation -- these pieces are destined to be cut from a single piece of wood.
I quickly realized I could write a simulator that took bits of a picture of an actual piece of zebrawood to see what the actual piece would look like, saving hours of work.  For example:

 

Here are some other designs I played with:

 
 
It remains to be seen how hard it will be to actually create these, but I like how they look now.

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I also realized why I like this kind of art so much.  It mixes the rich sensory experience of organic material with the more precise beauty of mathematics.  The experience of looking at and feeling the actual zebrawood spiral is something that doesn't really come across in pictures -- the wood has all kinds of interesting specular highlights and subsurface scattering properties that make it really pop.

I had the idea recently to create a wood surface with a spiral grain by using a laser cutter to cut slivers of wood that could be arranged into a circle.  If each sliver has the grain pointed slightly inward toward the center of the circle, then the overall grain effect will be a spiral.

It worked out rather well on zebrawood:



Some others I made out of cherry... the spiral feel is much more subtle.



Construction:

Hi all,

I want to try a Burning Man gifting style approach to Christmas presents this year.  I don't know who might be interested in the various odd bits of art I made on the lasercutter over the last few days.  So instead of guessing, I'll put it to you all -- if you saw anything in my previous post that you thought looked cool, and thought "hey, I'd love to have something like that", let me know and it's yours!  I can drop it by next time I see you... or if you're in a distant foreign country (eg Los Angeles) I can ship it to you.  I can't promise you'll get exactly what you want, since all these pieces are unique, but I'll try. 

Merry Christmas!

I've been laser-cutting jeans again.  I have mostly been doing more fractals...

 

... but a friend requested I surprise her with something, so I did this:


I also started a (non-LJ) lasercutter blog
 

I lasercut 28 houses and all the signs over the last 2 days.  This represents about 9 hours of lasercutting.  We now have 24 hours to paint everything, package it, and get it out to burningman.

All spread out on my floor:


A finished house:

I've been having all kinds of fun with the Techshop laser cutter recently.  The laser cutter can automatically cut or engrave any shape you want onto any material that's not too thick and doesn't emit poisonous fumes when heated. 

This of course opens up the possibility of making all kinds of intricate shapes that would ordinarily be too difficult to cut. 

For example, this thing: