Thanks for sharing, Josh! That little video is the kind of thing that needs to go out on social media, oh say, faceplant.
Oh, that’s the kind of problem that kept me up nights in college around 1990. We had to develop algorithms and then code them in Pascal to solve these sorts of problems.
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I do enjoy watching the smoke get whisked away like that.
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Ah Pascal…and Fortran…the memories…I was more partial to Assembly…lol
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The algorithm solution to the traveling salesman problem is worth more $$$ than anyone could ever imagine! 
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Pascal, mmmmmm … got to love the linked list solution in Pascal. 80s for me but I’m sure the concept of linked lists and sorting algorithms separated the men and women from the boys and girls.
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Yeah, that class was the make/break class for computer science majors. I made it through but only by scheduling the rest of my life around that one class and its homework. I think the class was called Discrete Structures.
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Thanks! 
Hopefully with the laser, I can make bigger holes nearer to the edge though – the one problem I’m running into this morning is I’m having to try to string them on with reinforced thread, which is quickly becoming a pain in the ass 
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I’ve been doing some cutting with my Silhouette Cameo on heavy cover stock for stencils of lettering. It is the most bizarre thing to see the head move around. It doesn’t make sense to me sometimes. It will cut a whole word out but leave a few letters. Some of it is how the interiors are cut last. Like the drunk salesman riff! I can’t imagine how challenging this would be in terms of programming. We’ve had some great threads on this topic here. Looking at the video doing all those circles, I imagine we will be very pleased with the speed compared to other CNC machines we might be used to.
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Is anyone out there old enough to appreciate the joke “FORTRAN IV with WATFOR and howcome”?
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Try using Fireline beading thread/fishing line, and use a wide-eye beading needle. It will make the job a LOT easier.
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Thank you – I totally hadn’t thought of fishing line (and I’ve got a roll in the closet)!
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I wanted to use WATFIV for a project once for a summer job, but it was too new and didn’t work with the math libraries I had…
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I remember my first days at Purdue (1979), keypunching fortran for hours onto cards. Midway through the semester, the prof terrified us when he announced we were going to have to learn how to use a new thing called a monitor. Many of us fell victim to those same keypunch chads later in the dorms as someone poured millions of them over the shower stall as we showered, creating instant paper mache.
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LOL Illinois in 1976, monitors first introduced in the computer lab in the dorm basement. Remember the machine that would resort your deck of cards if you dropped them? But only if you included sequence numbers in columns 80-86 or something.
Yes, and if you got one card out of order, you were doomed to wait another 5-30 minutes in line to compile again. One learned fast that triple checking your work was the way to go.
I was so mean to the girl who handled the output printer. I’d see my job come out on the page printer and I’d stand behind the window giving her the evil eye until she’d rip off the huge stack of jobs, then rip them into individual packets, and then slip them into the little slots for us to retrieve. And that was just one run of a program. Bug? Here we go again… Please forgive me, printout girl! The Commodore 64 was such a godsend, that I could run a program and get feedback immediately.
It is amazing that today I use programs like Mathcad to simulate and predict properties of new materials before I make them for the first time. I can predict things like solubility, toxicity, boiling point, , retention times on GC or HPLC, ozone depletion potential, many others. I am very thankful to the Union Carbide engineer that taught me the fractional factorial design method.
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Did you guys have PLATO for physics? Hours doing homework problems on an orange luminescent screen, rewarded with a text-based game version of Star Trek if you completed.
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OK, I think I’ve adequately derailed this thread. Sorry.
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