Week 1: Laser Cuting

This project was following and experimenting with the "Grasshopper Rhino Overview" instructions from MAT 238.

Things that went well:

• I was excited by the results from using a for-loop variable as one of the modulo values. It added an interesting asymmetry.
• I was surprised by how fine the laser's cuts were. One of my designs had many time holes and I wondered if the size of the lasers path would make it appear wider, but it still look like perfect points.

Things that didn't go well:

• I did not realize how long the laser cutting was going to take. Because my patterns were printing small as I wanted to squeeze a few on one piece of cardboard and there were many tiny individual shapes, the laser had to do a lot of traveling between cutting, using time.
• With the double for-loop to connect the dots giving the code a time complexity of O(N^2), it ran very slowly when the number of points got remotely high, which prevented me from really experimenting with lots of dense points.

The grasshopper program takes in two point coordinates, as well as values for the density of the grid, the modulo operation, and the maximum distance points can be to be connected.

The script checks each point in a standard grid to see if they should be created or not based on a formula which was tweaked and changed. It also loops through ever pair of points and checks their distance, drawing a line if they're close enough,

The pufferfish offset component allows us to draw a copy of something a set distance away from the original. Here it was to take the linear chaos and turn it into a sturdy and geometrically sound object.

The exported files were taken into Photoshop were they were taken and places to maximize efficiency. The color was changed to red and the stroke width 0.05 pt.