Foam CNC being a pain in the neck? Need some more crazy manufacturing projects we could have done for PoE? Sure! I (Colin) found a computerized cupcake froster!

Okay, never mind, foam CNC is much cooler!

I am deep in the depths of DXF hacking. Right now I'm looking through a Java DXF library called YCad. Things are sticky, to say the least. I love trying to understand pre-generic-typed java libraries. But even more I looooove trying to understand multi-threaded pre-generic-typed java libraries!!! >:-\

Since I've had enough trouble with YCad, I've looked for alternate means. One would be to convert to SVG first. Other blue foam cutters take SVG as input (we might even be able to use their software :p).

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dxf-svg-convert/ shows a tiny bit of promise. It is partly an inkscape plugin.

Okay, maybe dxf-svg-convert won't do. The author doesn't know how to make zips (one on the site is corrupt), and he missed all kinds of standard includes in his .cpp files, so it wouldn't compile. But working through it, now works. But the program produces some interesting results. Generally seems to work, until it does stuff like:

Yes, that is segfault's deathly cousin, the buffer-overflow!

Advantages of converting DXF to SVG is that.

1) It might be easier to support SVG

2) We could probably do SVG in python (not necessarily an advantage)

3) Other CNC Foam hackers code may be available

4) We suddenly support both DXF and SVG!!!