Introducing Heavy Fish Design (HFD)
Since I got my Glowforge a few years back I found that most of my designs seemed like they should be reusable, but weren’t because of minor variations of material thickness, or slight dimension changes etc. Additionally it would take too much effort to lay out the designs if they did not fit on a single piece of material. Being an engineer, I started writing code. I’ve been working on Heavy Fish Design (HFD) – (Thanks to my daughter for the name) for a couple of years now.
I’ve been using HFD for all my designs for the past few months and I think I finally got it :). I think (hope) you all will have a lot of fun with this. The project still needs some work, but I thought now would be a good time since many of us are stuck at home.
What is HFD?
A JSON based design language specifically built for designing for laser cutters. Code is written in golang, and it has permissive MIT license. I’ve added a bunch of designs which demonstrate the various functionality.
Some Highlights include:
- easy to use offsetting (i.e. adjusting for kerf).
- Automatic layout of parts within the size of your material.
- Splitting across multiple files if parts do not fit within the material.
- Full featured expression language for easy scaling of components.
- Easy to compose your designs into reusable custom components.
Feel free to ask me anything. I’m hoping you all are safe during these tough times.
Here are two candle holder designs my kids did this weekend using the Lathe (Part Transformers — Heavy Fish Design documentation) transformers.
