Inlays can be used to create a dramatic look on a flat surface. Like many issues with designs for carving, the difficulty comes from needing to carve out shapes using a round bit. I’ve talked before about “the inside corner problem” and about visualizing the problem to create more carvable designs. Now I want to show you how to create inlayable designs, compensating for the bit size.

Over the last several months, we have been working on a more modular toolpath architecture to support future growth of Easel, including support for different toolpath generation techniques. We’re happy to announce that this new architecture has now been integrated and released.

We introduced a feature to Easel that estimates the carving time of a design. Modeling the carving time is a complicated endeavor. The goal is to take a series of movements (next position and speed) and estimate the travel time. I will model the problem in several ways, each a bit more physically accurate than the last. You will learn a bit about physics and a bit about motion control.

We recently began to experiment with a new approach for writing expectations in automated tests. It’s inspired by the way a developer would investigate the behavior of a JavaScript app using the console or the node REPL.

Since we launched the Easel Apps API for early access last year, we’ve received a lot of excellent feedback from developers on how it could be improved. One of the apps that makes a good case study for improving the API is Vojtěch Kadlec’s puzzle generator. As I was considering how we could better support an app like his, I became a little curious about how one would go about generating puzzle pieces with unique shapes. I couldn’t resist tackling the problem, and I thought I’d share my approach to solving it.

The amount of time it takes to carve out a design in Easel can have a big impact on your enjoyment of the making experience. The less time you spend waiting for your machine to turn material into dust, the sooner you can move on to the next step. We recently made some software improvements that can significantly reduce carving time, and I wanted to tell you how we did it.

Internally, Easel represents many types of 2D shapes using Bézier paths and performs many operations on these curves as you work on your project. One frequent operation is calculating the bounding box of a path – and we recently sped up this calculation tenfold.

Since its inception, Easel has used an open-source Javascript library called Fabric to handle drawing and interacting with projects on the 2D side. Fabric knows how to draw text and many kinds of shapes, how to select objects and move or rotate or resize them, and how to read SVG files created with programs like Illustrator and Inkscape. Using a preexisting library like Fabric let us build a functioning and useful product more quickly than we could have if we’d developed all that functionality from scratch.

In Easel we want to be able to guide you to creating a design that will carve out the way you think it will. But it isn’t always easy to grok the effect the bit size has on the design you are trying to carve. Intuitively, it is like trying to draw inside the lines with a thick marker: here are some designs that are just too finely detailed. We want to answer a seemingly simple question: Will this design carve right?

Sometimes when cutting out a design, it can be helpful to break the process up across multiple jobs so that you can use a larger bit on the areas where you need to clear a lot of material, and a smaller bit on the areas where you need to get fine detail.