I made this Christmas card (shown here in silhouette) to try out the possibilities of the laser cutter in the Product Design Engineering department at Glasgow School of Art, where I do part-time teaching.
The usual way to use the laser cutter is to produce a drawing in a drawing package (eg CorelDraw). But all drawing packages have limits, and I wanted to find a way of getting computed shapes into the laser cutter, rather than drawn ones. Ideally, I wanted to be get the cutter to accept a text file with a list of coordinates (for the endpoints of the vectors that I wanted cut). To my surprise, this turned out to be very painless. Among CorelDraw's accepted input formats is SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics. This is a graphics counterpart to HTML, and provides a simple syntax for specifying lines, circles, and suchlike. So I could write a program to produce an SVG file for the pattern that I wanted to cut, and then import it into CorelDraw, after which getting it cut is trivial.
The outline of the card is the 5th iteration of the Koch Snowflake. The picture doesn't quite capture the final level of detail. I wrote a Python program to produce the SVG code for the pattern. Here is one line of the resulting SVG file:
<line x1="178.204890151" y1="383.002954831" x2="178.204890151" y2="383.002954831" stroke="black" stroke-width="1" />
To get the cutout text, I wrote the message on paper, photographed it, and pasted it into Excel as an image. I then laboriously drew polygons round it, and wrote Visual Basic code to export the coordinates of the polygon vertices as a text file. My Python program then turned these into SVG. The holly motif was done in the same way.
I was amazed by the delicacy with which the laser cutter cuts. Take a look at the strip of card that defines the slight loop in the ascender of the "h" in "Christmas". This is joined to the rest of the card by a filament of card perhaps 0.25mm wide.
(The letters are holes in the card. The texture visible inside them is from the lampshade that was behind the card!)