Simple Papercut Fractals

Beyond the Manual
1

Hello, GF community!

I’ve been so inspired by creativity of the members of this forum, that I felt the need to start contributing.

My 10 year old son was recently fascinated by fractal designs and we decided to see if we could paper cut something on the GF. We settled on a simple Sierpinski triangle. Being lazy, instead of drawing it out in inkscape, we wrote a python program to draw it for us using the svgwrite library.

We used an acid free drawing paper, and after playing around with the power settings we found these that worked best:

  • cuts: speed 300, power 12
  • scores for folds: speed 400, power 7
  • (YMMV depending on your paper weight)

The scores all held up well (they didn’t cut through the paper)

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IMG_20180214_011006612×816 138 KB

Here’s what it looks like onscreen.

IMG_20180214_004116
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I uploaded the code to github here: GitHub - sparamona/SierpinskiTriangleSVG: Python script to draw Sierpinski triangles for the laser cutter if anyone is interested.

Thank you for the continued inspiration!

45 Likes
2

Oh, how beautiful! (All that folding.) :grinning:

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3

Wow! Thanks for sharing! I’ll definitely give that a try when my Glowforge is working again.

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4

Great project. Thank you for sharing.

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5

That is fantastic!!

And thank you for the reference to svgwrite. That will be very helpful!

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6

That is amazing ! And thanks also for that svgwrite reference. And now perhaps a 3d Hilbert curve fold?

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7

Not my definition of lazy!

What a great project :sunglasses:

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8

Beautiful!