I am one of the creators of Cuttle. It stems from my research building direct manipulation + programming environments like http://recursivedrawing.com/ and http://aprt.us/

From a programmer's perspective, you can think of Cuttle as a direct manipulation vector editor (like Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator) that can be driven with parameters and JS code where you need it.

Unlike my previous research projects, this is a commercial startup mostly catering to laser cutting small businesses, though you can use it for anything where you want a 2D vector editor + some programmatic capabilities.

I'll try to answer questions that come up in this HN thread.

Thank you for sharing your work Hannah! Very cool stuff!

I got excited when I read "parametric"… thinking it would be akin to what Autocad Inventor had 20+ years ago (setting angles between lines, setting lines to be parallel etc.) since I was recently looking for a simple CAD tool that could do that. Alas.

I was briefly a member of a makerspace with a laser cutter - and it was brilliant! The ratio of effort to results was far better than any other CNC tools I’ve used.

But then COVID and moving house put an end to that. I’d love to recreate something similar at home - but at a budget.

Does anyone have a low cost laser cutter that actually works? It seems like there’s an increasing number of Chinese ones out there, but quality and capabilities are unclear.

Pedant alert. Learning curve is skill/time.

> with an exceptionally shallow learning curve

I'm used to long learning time to incorrectly described as steep, but I haven't seen shallow used as short.

Time to officially deprecate steep and shallow, and use short and long instead.

Always so wowed by posts about maker spaces :)

Is it normal in the states? And is it full of cool projects?

I’m very curious about the fonts available in Cuttle. Are these all free fonts, or did some need to be licensed? Is it possible to use professional fonts which are on your local machine (without exporting as outlines)? How much adjustment needed to be done to make them appropriate for laser cutting etc? Many fonts which make sense for screen or printing need a lot of detail work to make sense for CAD work.

Perhaps someone on this thread will know the answer to this: is it possible to make V shaped grooves with a laser cutter, or would they end up stepped?

What do they mean by "create 5 free projects"? Will they laser-cut it for you and send it to you by mail?

Cuttle looks amazing for 2D geometric patterns. I really must find time to play with it some day and make something. Maybe on leather.

Totally dig this, especially the doorbell chime cover & music box!