Hi everyone,
Over the past two months I've been working with collaborators Monique DeSalvo and Ryan Alexander on a
Sun Seeds crowdfunding campaign. Sun Seeds are geometric, color-changing sculptures we designed which consist of flat pieces that interlock to create 3D shapes.

We're offering kits for people to make their own Sun Seed sculptures. Check out
our Indiegogo campaign! We think anyone who likes crafting, geometry, rainbows, or 3D puzzles will enjoy these kits. Our crowdfunding campaign ends in a few days — October 30th.

This project has been a great opportunity for me to do in-house user testing on the current Cuttle prototype. I've made several changes based on Monique and Ryan's needs and suggestions and have a prioritized to-do list going forward.
I also have more confidence that Cuttle — with its marriage of direct manipulation and full programmability — is on the right track as the foundation for design tooling that can fully take advantage of digital fabrication. Despite the interface quirks of a two-month old prototype, both Monique and Ryan agreed that Cuttle was the right tool for this project. In the rest of this newsletter I'll share two success stories.
Symbols and Symmetry
Here's a "Succulent" Sun Seed.

This sculpture is based on an
icosahedron. It's made of twenty identical flat units (derived from a triangle) which interlock together (five at each vertex).
To create the flat unit, I created a bezier curve which I mirrored to create a petal with bilateral symmetry.

I cloned the petal at two scales, along with some joining curves.

I cloned this three times to make a triangle — for a total of six petals on each triangular unit.

I cloned five units around their interlocking point to preview what the finished "flower" at each vertex will look like.

Notably, with Cuttle, by performing the above operations I'm creating a
program which generates the final shape. I can then modify the bezier curve I started with (a
literal in programming lingo) and watch as the program live updates the final output.

I can also fine-tune the relative scales and locations of the petals and their adjoining curves through direct manipulation.
We had previously designed Sun Seeds using legacy vector software — Illustrator and Affinity Designer. Using these, I would copy, paste, and transform the initial curve to create the final shape with the desired symmetry. But if I wanted to modify the original curve I'd need to repeat the copy, paste, and transform operations. This increases the time and effort it takes to iterate a design, and quick iterations are at the heart of any design process!
Illustrator and Affinity Designer have a "symbol" feature which in theory would be able to preserve the above operations and do live updates, but in practice we found the symbol feature to be buggy, especially when nesting symbols. Symbols also cannot consist of partial paths which get joined into a longer path.
Cuttle is designed with features like "symbols" and "symmetry" — more generally, parameterized functions and for-loops — at its foundation. Any repeated or computationally controlled aspect of your design can be automated with these programming-like features, while still allowing for the expressivity, convenience, and visual workflow of direct manipulation (drag-and-drop) when it's desired.
Doubled Cuts
I had originally designed Cuttle as a "CAD" tool which exports a shape (as an SVG file) that is then fed into a separate "CAM" tool which drives the cutting machine to cut out that shape. But in this episode I was reminded that these two parts of the digital fabrication process are always linked.
We are cutting the Sun Seed pieces using a Cricut knife cutter. To cut through our material, the Cricut needs to make two passes with its blade. The Cricut software has a feature to turn on multiple passes, however this feature will do a first pass on all of the pieces before doing its second pass. By the time the second pass starts the machine will occasionally become misaligned by a few millimeters, ruining the cut. As our material is expensive and we're making hundreds of Sun Seed kits, this is obviously a big problem.
We wanted the Cricut to
immediately make a second pass on a piece after the first pass, rather than doing a first pass on
all the pieces before a second pass on all the pieces. This would reduce the chances of misalignment.
The Cricut software doesn't have an option for this, but Ryan had the insight that Cuttle could return each piece as a path which traced over itself twice. That is, we'd double the cut in the SVG file and then tell the Cricut to just do a single pass.
In Cuttle, you can wrap any geometry in a "Code" block which can modify the geometry within it arbitrarily. Ryan wrote a few lines of javascript which doubles each path. Now we wrap our final output in that code block whenever we need to cut from the rainbow material. The misalignment issue is solved!
Thank you for reading this second issue of the Cuttle newsletter!
Until next time,
<3 Toby