"Who's the moon now EARTH?" These are amazing photos. The surface of the moon looks fake. Actually, it all seems fake. www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2...
Sheldon McGee
@tooshel.bsky.social
74 followers 210 following 86 posts
Professional Flutter and Rust Developer, maker, husband, dad, conference organizer, engineering manager. IoT, building 3D printers. @tooshel on twitter, @tooshel@fosstodon.org on mastodon but I wish I could just stay here.
![I've been using the laser cutters at my local makerspace to cut lots of spiral shapes like this:
[Photo of 3 plywood pieces, each with a spiral formed out of a different repeating shape laser-cut into it.]
If you want to do the same, you might open Inkscape, make a shape, and scale it and rotate it:
[Screenshot of solid pentagons, each one slightly rotated and smaller than the last. The pentagons are completely filled in.]
Here's the catch. Laser cutter software's kinda dumb - all it can do when cutting is trace the paths (outer lines) of your shapes. So you could feed the above into it, and it would cut it, but what we'd end up with is the smallest pentagon and a bunch of tiny obtuse triangle shards, rather than a connected shape.
In my pieces, the wooden "lines" are actually part of the solid shape; I made them by creating a sort of shape frame using a "difference" operation and then scaling and rotating that. Like so:
[Screenshot of:
- Two solid squares, one nested inside the other, labelled "overlapping shapes".
- A hollow square with a thick, filled-in edge, labelled "difference".
- A spiral pattern made out of these hollow squares, nested and rotated. The places the squares are touching are still separated by strokes. Labeled "transform: rotate and scale repeatedly".
- The same spiral, but all the squares are now fused into a single shape. No strokes are visible at the places the squares touch. Labeled "union".
]
It has to be done this way (as far as I can tell); even if you used a stroke style multiple millimeters thick, the laser would still just cut a 0.1mm line at the center of the stroke. So be sure strokes are drawn on BOTH sides of the wooden struts you want!
--Jay McGavren, September 2025](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hjxzww33epzvppwiq2rmkaff/bafkreic3pfybpxm2yemqmifauxu3yahqtbsj723v5ykomq64pjozqa6dei)
