The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

The New Hotness

  • Layered Paper: Einsteins

    Go to the source and bring back a suitable number of tiled einsteins:

    Einstein tiling
    Einstein tiling

    Import the bitmap into LightBurn, fiddle with the tracing until it lays down two lines along each border, apply a 1 mm inset to all the tiles, then scale & crop & delete to fit a 170 mm square:

    Einsteins - LB paper - top layer
    Einsteins – LB paper – top layer

    Cut one of those sheets, tape it to a sheet of white paper, fire up a calculator, generate a random number, write the first digit in the upper-left tile, and iterate to fill in all the tiles.

    Duplicate that layout and delete all the tiles marked with a zero to get the next layer.

    Iterate for all ten layers:

    Einsteins - LB paper cuts
    Einsteins – LB paper cuts

    Set up the fixture, do the Print-and-Cut alignment, then cut all the layers with different colors:

    Layered Paper cutting fixture - in use
    Layered Paper cutting fixture – in use

    Assemble the layers with some stick adhesive:

    Layered Paper - Einsteins
    Layered Paper – Einsteins

    Frame it and admire:

    Layered Paper - Einsteins
    Layered Paper – Einsteins

    It’s way busier than the quilt blocks, but I like it.