Fabricaide

Source code for Fabricaide: Fabrication-Aware Design for 2D Cutting Machines.

Acknowledgements

Fabricaide is a system that helps designers of laser-cut objects make material-conscious design decisions and make the most of their scrap material. If you use Fabricaide as part of your research, please cite it as follows

Fabricaide: Fabrication-Aware Design for 2D Cutting Machines. Ticha Sethapakdi, Daniel Anderson, Adrian Reginald Chua Sy, Stefanie Mueller. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2021

Requirements

• Mac OSX 10.6+ (may work with older versions) or Windows
• Adobe Illustrator (if you are using the non-2020 version of Illustrator, you will have to modify path in FabricaideUI to point to the correct location)
• The latest version of Processing

Fabricaide backend setup

• Install Packaide and follow the instructions there
• Initialize the sample material database by running python3 initmatdb.py MatDB.svg

Creating your own material database

If you want to use your own material database instead of the example one provided, you will need to modify MatDB.svg.

• Open MatDB.svg in a vector-editing program (e.g. Illustrator)
• Double-check that the document resolution is 72 PPI
• Refer to the graphic below for info on how this document should be structured:

Processing setup

You will need the ControlP5 library and processing-java. This step only needs to be done once.

• Open Processing
• Tools > install "processing-java"
• Sketch > Import library > add library
• Search for "ControlP5" and install it

Adobe Illustrator swatch setup

If you plan on using Fabricaide with Adobe Illustrator and do not already have the custom Illustrator swatch, you will need to do the following:

• Open up Adobe Illustrator
• Open up the Swatches panel (if it is not visible, go to Window->Swatches)
• In the lower-left hand corner of the panel select the Swatch Libraries menu, then select Other Library...
• Inside the src/FabricaideUI folder, select the Fabricaide.ai file

Once you have the Fabricaide swatch imported, you can now select it in the Swatch Libraries menu, under the User Defined submenu

Using Fabricaide with Adobe Illustrator

• Create a blank Adobe Illustrator document (use a resolution of 72 PPI and color mode of RGB)
• (Mac) Double-click the Fabricaide.command file (it is a Terminal shell script), or run ./Fabricaide.command in Terminal
  (Windows) Run Fabricaide.bat
• Please refer to the Fabricaide Reference Guide for more details on how to use Fabricaide with Illustrator

Using Fabricaide with other programs

Fabricaide should work with any program that exports SVG; however, in some situations, you will have to make light modifications to the Fabricaide code. More details forthcoming.