Origami with the Glowforge

This is what I need to know for settings! Paper! I just got mine last night, and I can’t seem to get the right settings for scoring with paper similar to yours. What do you have your settings at for both cuts and scores? I think I have a good setting for cuts, but I’m always open to testing out more.

This is absolutely amazing.

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Sweet! I’ve wondered if this was possible for a while now. Thanks for sharing.

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Some beautiful pieces … Thank you for posting!

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Love this. Absolutely fantastic. I was thinking of trying something like this with motor driven structures that move and respond to touch. Great work.

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You have my attention!

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Embed a flex sensor or possibly some of this


with some thin wire woven through an origami structure attached to servos and suddenly you’ve got structures that react to your touch. Paper flowers that close or retract onto themselves when touched, then slowly re-emerge for example.

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Oh how beautiful! It had never occurred to me that lasers could be used to aid in origami. Really lovely work :slight_smile:

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I’ve had pretty good luck with laser scoring fold lines on cover stocks of various sorts so far. So, it may depend on the stock you are using. For example, I have been using power of 20, speed of 500 (20 / 500) to score 100lb Hammermill cover.

I have had some issues with it cutting all the way through at the start and stop of score lines but, not always.

The dotted or dashed line thing mentioned by @evansd2 is also widely-used by people working with lasers and paper. I’m generally not happy with the aesthetic doing that, though.

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This. Is. Amazing! I love the slightly matt finish designs. Just a subtle difference in the light between surfaces.

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There is also Flexinol and similar shape memory alloys. Check out Jie Qi’s work:

https://makezine.com/2012/01/31/skill-builder-working-with-shape-memory-alloy/

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Wow, cool looking finished pieces. I tried origami once…Key word being ‘tried’.

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on his website, Robert Lang has designs in “crease pattern”, that are nicely compatible with the glowforge. He also uses laser cutting/scoring for his designs sometimes. Then the folding part is the trickiest, I guess my 20 years of experience in origami helped!

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that would be great, not sure if it is possible though… I think I’ll try engraving, I was just too impatient to try!

except the glowforge doesn’t accept dashed lines yet! I think engraving is the way to go for now, and avoid thin papers…

yes that’s definitely another solution I could try, thanks!

I’m still finding the right ones, and it depends on the type of paper, I have very different types. But for scoring, the lowest power and highest speed is the way to go, but even then you end up with small holes sometimes. For cutting, maybe 20-50 for the power and high speed seems to work most of the time, just avoid multiple passes: if the paper is already cut, it will fly, potentially in front of the laser! (that happened…) Also magnets are necessary to hold the paper.

You can convert dashes to tiny vectors in inkscape.

Make a line with a dashed style. Select line.

Extensions -> modify path -> convert to dashes

Voila, tiny little dash vectors.

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my paper is usually thinner than cardstock, but thanks for the tip, I will try soon. For the dashes/dots, the glowforge is not compatible with that yet, hopefully soon!

Thanks for the tip, that’s very useful!

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