A work of woody-love made to recycle paper and delight Christian's preschool students.
There's a meta-blog here where I track my progress on modifying/improving this blog's content.
Cut Scrappy's mouth out with Genmitsu
Prover 4030 CNC
Try using gcodetools to convert and cut.
Try installing FlatCAM and importing the
svg to see how to generate g-code.
Try Universal Gcode Sender, or Candle or
something else on Prover 4030.
I cannot begin to document all the machinations I went through with claude.ai to generate the Python code which I used to generate the gcode for Scrappy.
Suffice to say that you can find the code under the directory cam_scripts/, and the gcode files generated from the code in cam_scripts/gcode/
| Name | Comment |
|---|---|
| 📁 cam_scripts/ | |
| 📁 gcode/ | |
| eyebrows_1_roundover.gcode | |
| eyebrows_2_cutout.gcode | |
| scrappy_1_whites.gcode | |
| scrappy_2_pupils.gcode | |
| scrappy_3_mouth.gcode | |
| scrappy_4_mouth_roundover.gcode | |
| scrappy_toolpath_preview.png | |
| config.py | |
| eyebrows_geometry.py | |
| eyebrows_main.py | |
| eyebrows_verify.py | |
| gcode.py | |
| geometry.py | |
| main.py | |
| README.md | This file tells you what to run and how to run it. |
| requirements.txt | Run in a .venv, and load these modules. |
| toolpath.py | |
| verify.py | |
The bottom line here is that this process is very much NOT REPEATABLE. Even with the generated gcode files, I ruined many workpieces just attempting to carve them.
In fact, as I write this, I could not remember how I generated the *_roundover files. Turns out it's done in main.py and eyebrows_main.py
Following the advice from Gemini, I need to fix/change svg/scrappy.svg,
so I make a copy of him at svg/scrappy-wood.svg
.
I also hand-measured the workpiece, having cut it to size copying from another piece.
It takes quite a while, and many operations and questions
to Claude about using Inkscape to get the drawing organized
into layers per CNC operation.
Claude generated three .svg
files, which I put into a directory called svg/scrappy-wood/.
| Name | Comment |
|---|---|
| 📁 svg/ | |
| 📁 scrappy-wood/ | |
| scappy-centered-on-4030-stock.svg | svg centered on workpiece (which was hand-measured) |
| scrappy.svg | original simplified by claude.ai |
| eyebrows.svg | eyebrows simplified by claude.ai |
claude.ai produced svg/scrappy-wood/scrappy.svg
shown below (which doesn't look like much, but is actually
much simplified from its original form).
The next step is to use something like FlatCAM to import the .svg
file into a form which can be converted to g-code.
In Claude AI's UI, I found the chat and shared it privately.
I opened the shared chat in another Chrome window and then used the singleFile Chrome extension to export the conversation with Claude AI to an html file.
But that file was weirdly completely blank visibly - although the file was huge
Tried a different approach. I copied and pasted from the browser into a new LibreOffice Writer document, and saved that document as HTML
That process involved using the File | Export function, and then changing the output format to be HTML.
Already kind of got started on the project before setting up this blog.
When the original scrappy came to us, he was in pretty sorry shape (here he is in the garage):
Seems he had been torn up and thrown away by janitorial staff, so we brought him upstairs so we could measure him.
We measured his body dimensions as best we could, and then cut away all the broken material except for his face. Notice that he's missing his left eyebrow. We actually still had that, but both eyebrows are the same shape, so I could have cut a mirror image of the original and used that. Anway, here's what he looks like after cutting away his body..
Having measured his body dimensions, we cut out a new wooden body for him, based on those.
Now, his body is 16" high, 18" wide, and 24" deep.
His new body is made mostly of 1/2" smooth birch veneer plywood: from Home Depot Bothell (#4712). The actual product is 1/2 in. x 4 ft. x 8 ft. PureBond Birch Plywood
His bottom (underside) is made of a kind of outdoor-capable composite board. It's very strong.
The bottom and sides are fit together with a router-cut trench
Poor guy was missing his mustache and an eyebrow, but we put his face right as best we could:
. His face is now almost 16" (15⅞") wide and 18" (78⅞") high
Then we traced his mouth and eye shape onto a piece of paper with a mechanical pencil.
We used Inkscape to import a picture of his flattened face and used Inkscape to trace out the outline of his eyes and mouth.
We then used Inkscape to fill in his mouth and pupils, thinking we might draw him onto the wood with a laser etcher/engraver.
But after much experimentation, we realized that the laser wasn't going to be the right tool for the job.
We might be able to use the laser to draw his pupils, but what we really need to do is carve recesses for the whites of his eyes, and then paint them white.
Then we'll cut a hole for his mouth. His teeth can be painted white too, but we decided not to recess them because that would weaken them a bit.
I did a .fork of https://github.com/pflagerd/blog-bootstrap