Hi all! A while ago I became interested in generating maze designs and started writing code to make circular and square mazes for my kids to solve. Then all the sudden it occurred to me that this would be a really cool pattern to laser score onto something like a cork coaster… so I did!
Each coaster has a completely unique maze on it. I had to spend quite a while figuring out how to generate the SVG files to satisfy the GFUI so I could have a repeatable method of producing bunches of coasters.
I tweeted out some pictures of the coasters I made for myself, and several people said they wanted to buy some (to my great surprise), so I made a site and have sold 60 orders so far!
Just wanted to share this fun project, and if you also want some maze coasters of your own, the site is… you guessed it… https://mazecoasters.com/
Happy to answer questions, because I learned a lot!
Yeah. There’s an app for almost anything now. Always check for that, before reinventing the wheel.
One of my favorite questions to ask job interviewees is: This is a question I ask every prospective employee - On top of a table there is a coin under an inverted/empty water glass. To pass the interview, tell me how to get the coin out from under the glass without touching the glass or the table. There is only one right answer and in all the years I’ve asked this only one person has gotten the answer correctly. Some say “I have no idea” and that’s actually good for partial credit. The vast majority launch off in to some engineering related fantasy to accomplish the task and they get no credit. The correct answer is “I’d go find the last guy who passed this test and ask him how he did it”.
I did check for that, and I reinvented the wheel because that wheel wasn’t the wheel I wanted or needed Now with one command I can generate hundreds of maze designs perfectly aligned in SVG format for uploading, no need to align further in GFUI. Now I don’t need to download hundreds of files from mazegenerator and spend hours aligning them. Sometimes people do things that look like “re-inventing the wheel” for very good reasons. Sometimes the current wheel isn’t round enough.
I fear that your tool chain might be a little loose. That kind of aligning is pretty trivial? With a wget script and some basic text work you could make thousands of svgs in a single command line.
Anyhoo cool that you built yourself a little widget, good luck to you with your side hustle.
You should look to market this. Drink coasters with random mazes on each seems sellable. I imagine a drinking game where the person to finish their maze last has to take a shot or chug a beer.
Need to make them from something you can use dry-erase markers with maybe. Though I suppose use-once would generate more longer-term sales.
