More foundation work on the Pop-up project

Well the paper cutter that I have access too is a Pazzles Inspiration.  Interesting machine.  I’m looking forward to playing with it a bit.

The Inspiration uses a WPC file format.  I downloaded a file off the net to peek into it. I was hoping that it might something like G-code or DXF but unfortunately no such luck.  It’s a binary ;(.
I opened it up in hexedit and I can see patterns in the data, but it’s not worth it to me to figure out how to write directly to a WPC.  Supposedly the Middleware  can convert various file formats to WPC.  Over labor day I’m visiting,  so I’m planning on checking this out and giving it a whirl.

Now…. Since I’m rather partial to opensource linux stuff, I trying to figure out some software that I can use for my little project here.   I downloaded and compiled the source for Heekscad yesterday night.  Darn that stuff is starting to look nice.  I was really pleased to see that you can now choose either metric or inch.  (Yepp I’m one of those backward inch folks)

What to do here… I do want to learn Blender but the 2.4 front end has a steep learning curve.   2.5* is still in alpha according to http://www.blender.org/development/ .  Poor life timing for me since Blender seems well suited and has been used quite a bit for Paper Engineering as well as developing some models for a 3d game I’ve been wanting to write for my daughter… (Probably be a teenager by the time I get to that ;(.

I really should start trying to use heekscad.  So many of my interests converge with this application.   I suppose as a first step I need to see if I can export a sketch to a DXF and see if I can get it imported into Pazzle software and convert it to a DXF.

Ok… I think I have my next steps defined

  • use heekscad to generate sketch
  • see if we can gets something saved in DXF
  • if it looks good, watch the tutorial on solver (link somewhere on the reprap group)
  • make a Pop-Up box  (2d flat)
  • Export to DXF
  • See if we can get it to convert to WPC
  • attempt a cut-out
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