#SundayStew for October 6th, 2024 - All The Stuff That Happened This Week Part B

This is what I meant to do last week. I wanted to talk about all of the progress and setbacks I experienced in the past week. Here is a link to Part A, the recipe. 

First, I had this idea for cute little dice cups. All I needed was lids. The jars are recycled yogurt jars, the glass beads were leftovers from my daughter's fishbowl and the dice are something I had left over from a D&D campaign. 

Well, it seemed pretty simple until it wasn't. I was going to cut the lids from 3 mm thick wood but I accidentally bought a 5 mm sheet of birch project board. 

I did a trial run and it seemed fine. Except I cut a rectangular piece, not circles. I didn't think about what I was asking the laser to do. I used a caliper to measure the interior and exterior dimensions. These are Oui Yorgurt jars. Here are the measurements: 

Interior dimensions: 55.700 mm 
Exterior dimensions: 69.000 mm

Here is the problem of what I attempted to do with the laser. LaserGRBL and Falcon2 attempt to cut by moving back and forth along the X and Y axes. What that means for circles is the laser attempts to blast a series of holes through the target, in the shape of circles. It starts in the bottom corner and blasts a dot-like hole as deep as possible, then moves on to the next dot, and so on.  

This means the laser has to dump 22 watts of power into a pin-prick area and move on. When you are cutting straight lines, the laser moves at a predetermined speed dumping its power into the target. The beam can smoothly slice through wood. 

That is different from firing full power for a brief moment and moving a large distance before repeating. The energy is discontinuous. It took hours of repeated tries to cut circles. Eventually, it worked but I'll never do that again. 

I meant to burn a series of dice images onto the lids. Recently purchased some .svg files on Esty, so I thought this would be easy. 

No. Either I didn't like the images or the license on the image was objectable, most not extending the right to put the image on a physical object or otherwise modifying it. 

I suddenly landed a new project. Make a package of dice images specifically for various projects, from digital products to physical goods. On the left is a sample image. I suspect I will be doing blank dice and numbered dice, both black on white and white on black. These would be .svg files so they are easy to modify. For completeness, I would make a set of .tifs and .xcf files with a transparent background.

And my drive for completeness makes this project "epic scale". I need 6 images of blank dice, 60 images of numbered dice. I can double that for black on white and white on black. I can double that again for the .xcf and .tif files. More if I want to have .png and .jpg. 

Hell. I will probably break this into three different files. The Friends and Family Pack would be 12 .png images priced at PWYW and would be the hardest to modify. The Dev Pack at $7.99 would be blank dice in positive and negative for the user to create stuff from there. That is 12 images in 4-6 file types. The Complete Set of Dice would contain hundreds of files owing to the numbering and would be $24.99. As time permits, I will be completing and loading these to Ko-Fi and DriveThruRPG. 

The licensing would be really friendly for each. If you use them for a blog or digital product, an attribution someplace therein would be required. If you modify the files into something else, say colorize or make them part of a completely different image, then attribution is optional. Placing images on a physical object like a coffee mug, map, or t-shirt requires no attribution. The big hangup is the license does not permit the use of the files to make another clip art package. I don't care if you sell 10,000 books, T-shirts, and coffee mugs using the images, I just don't want someone reselling them in a new clip art package, modified or not.  

In other news, my son spotted a piece of artwork on ESTY that he wanted burned onto a plaque. Ah, another rabbit hole. 

BUT the file has the exact license I want. In fact, the creator asks people to post images of their products made with the image. That is exactly what I want to do with my dice images. 

This is an image of a KC-135 refueler. My son wants it flipped the other way around. The completist in me knows there is only one main door on the left side, so I have to modify this file for accuracy because there isn't a door on the right side. Also the little curved panel under and slightly behind the cockpit is also not visible on the opposite side. 

And that rabbit hole will continue throughout the next few weeks. Tomorrow's post will be about the 6 mechs I got painted.