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Obsessed with Cuttle: Parametric CAD for prototyping, producing, and procrastin (hannahilea.com)
68 points by todsacerdoti 5 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments





I am one of the creators of Cuttle. It stems from my research building direct manipulation + programming environments like http://recursivedrawing.com/ and http://aprt.us/

From a programmer's perspective, you can think of Cuttle as a direct manipulation vector editor (like Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator) that can be driven with parameters and JS code where you need it.

Unlike my previous research projects, this is a commercial startup mostly catering to laser cutting small businesses, though you can use it for anything where you want a 2D vector editor + some programmatic capabilities.

I'll try to answer questions that come up in this HN thread.

Thank you for sharing your work Hannah! Very cool stuff!


I'm mainly curious whether the concepts in Cuttle could be exposed as plugins in Inkscape, or as a standalone application written in Qt-Python.

A Cuttle project is — behind the scenes — a program. Each “component” is a function. “Modifiers” are functions that take input geometry (and parameters) and use JS code to create arbitrary output geometry. All of this code can be live edited.

At the same time you can do arbitrary “drawing” with a bezier pen tool and move/transform shapes. In this case you are essentially using the canvas drag-and-drop to manipulate literals in the program.

But fundamentally a Cuttle project is a program and the Cuttle Editor is an IDE that looks like a vector editor on the surface.

Because of this I’m not sure how much of Cuttle could be grafted onto a program whose architecture is more rooted as an editor of static vector graphics. I do know that Inkscape has some “live effects” which are similar to Cuttle’s “live” modifiers.

If you are interested in Cuttle’s architecture, I did a one hour walkthrough on this interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2el-85vG-IU


Always so wowed by posts about maker spaces :)

Is it normal in the states? And is it full of cool projects?


What do they mean by "create 5 free projects"? Will they laser-cut it for you and send it to you by mail?

On a free account you can create up to 5 projects in the Cuttle Editor (and you can delete them if you want to create more...)

We don't laser cut anything for you. You can download your project as an SVG file (or DXF, etc) which you can then send to a laser cutter hooked up to your computer.

The product is designed for people who have access to a laser cutter, e.g. at home or at a makerspace.


Totally dig this, especially the doorbell chime cover & music box!



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