Projects · Josh Hicks

01

Laser cutter

8 tools

Cut, score, engrave: every one of these hands you a ready-to-run file.

01 Patch: Quilt Block Generator SVGLaser Pick a quilt block, assign your fabrics, get every piece cut to size. Twenty-three classic blocks: Card Trick, Bear’s Paw, Log Cabin, Dutchman’s Puzzle, Jacob’s Ladder and the rest, plus a grid editor for building your own out of half-square, quarter-square, snowball and four-patch units. Set the finished size and it works out every piece, adding the seam allowance by offsetting the finished shape, which reproduces the traditional rules (a half-square triangle lands on finished + ⅞″, a quarter-square on + 1¼″) and also handles geometry no rule book covers. Upload photos of your actual fabric to see the block before you cut it. Pieces are laid out on grain, one set of sheets per fabric. 02 Arrange: SVG Nesting SVGLaser Pack parts onto sheet stock with as little waste as the geometry allows. Drop in SVGs, set quantities and your stock size, and it nests them, interlocking concave outlines rather than just packing bounding boxes. Kerf clearance, grain lock for plywood, automatic overflow onto more sheets, and merged common lines so the laser cuts a shared edge once instead of twice. 03 Crease: Origami Pattern Generator SVGLaser Parametric origami tessellations, sized to your sheet. Miura-ori, Yoshimura, waterbomb and curved concentric creases, exported as a laser-ready SVG with separate cut, mountain and valley layers. Perforate the valleys or score both faces, with registration marks either way. 04 Unfold: STL to Paper Net SVGLaser A low-poly STL flattened into a net that cuts as one piece. Searches for an overlap-free unfolding and simplifies the model only when it has to. Glue tabs, numbered edges and m/v fold marks, plus a slider that folds the flat net back into the model. Exports with red cuts, blue scores and green engraving. 05 Scissor Lattice Generator SVGLaser Expandable scissor lattices, every bar laid out flat. Set coverage area, opening size and bar shape, watch a live 3D preview of the lattice expanding, then export all the bars nested flat on the sheet. 06 s1c3r: STL Sheet Slicer SVGLaser Any STL sliced into a stack of cuttable sheets. Load a model, orient it in 3D, and slice it along any axis. Exports a tiled SVG with alignment holes and adjustable material thickness so the stack glues up square. 07 LAZAR: Laser Image Prep PNGLaser Photographs dithered down to something an engraver can burn. Image preparation for laser engraving, with a set of dithering algorithms to compare side by side. Tune contrast and threshold against the material you are actually burning before you commit the sheet. 08 STL to Depth Map PNG Any STL, orbited in 3D, exported as a 16-bit grayscale depth map. Load a model, pick the projection axis, toggle orthographic or perspective, and export a full-range PNG. The 3D counterpart to LAZAR: where that preps a photo for engraving, this preps a model.

02

3D printer

4 tools

Draw it, generate it, or photograph it, and out comes a slicer-ready STL or 3MF.

09 Terra: 3D Printable Map Generator STL3MF Draw a box anywhere on Earth and print what is inside it. Pulls OpenStreetMap buildings, roads, water and greenery, drapes them over real elevation data, and exports a multicolor 3MF or a plain STL. Runs entirely in the browser. 10 Relief: 3D Printable Panel Generator STL3MF Procedural relief wall panels at exact real-world dimensions. Packed bubbles, angular shards, or both at once, with a live 3D preview. Every design is seeded, so a panel you liked six months ago comes back identical. 11 Imprint: Photo to Slat Relief STL3MFLaser Drop in a photo and its brightness becomes depth. A relief panel with live preview and levels and smoothing controls. Preview it as stacked laser-cut slats instead of a solid print, then export whichever one you want to make. Photos never leave the browser.

03

Simulation

2 tools

Things that run and keep running. Nothing to export: open it and watch.

12 Cloche: Flies on a Windowsill Live Real fruit-fly connectomes, running live in your browser. Flies on a sunny kitchen windowsill, each one running its actual connectome: the FlyWire female brain and the Janelia male brain, every neuron and synapse. They taste, smell, and learn which smells mean sugar. A male sees a female and his own courtship neurons make him sing; she hears, accepts, and lays eggs on the banana. Eggs hatch, larvae crawl and pupate, and new flies climb out with brains of their own. 13 WebGL Wave Tank Live A terrain box with real-time wave physics you can sculpt. Push the ground around and ripple the water directly in the viewport. An experiment in doing fluid response fast enough to feel like a material rather than a render.

04

Data & media

4 tools

Files and public data in, something readable out.

14 Aerial LiDAR Map Slide the ground out from under the trees. A swipe between bare-earth LiDAR and aerial imagery. Bare earth is the survey with the vegetation stripped out, so old roadbeds, homesteads, quarries and sinkholes show up plainly where the aerial photo shows nothing but canopy, which in the Ozarks is most of it. Multidirectional hillshade, slope and elevation-tinted views, contours at 2, 5 or 10 ft, live elevation under the cursor, and a link that restores exactly what you were looking at. 15 Fayetteville Foraging Map Map Edible plants around Fayetteville, filtered by what is in season. An interactive map with seasonal filtering and search by plant type, so the question "what can I pick this week" has an answer you can walk to. 16 Video Transcript Tool Text Video or audio in, transcript out, with no API key, no server. Whisper inference running locally in the browser tab. The file never leaves your machine, which matters more than the convenience does. 17 Instagram Analytics Dashboard Dashboard Any public handle, broken down into a full dashboard. Post breakdowns, hashtag performance, hook pattern analysis and cadence heatmaps, enough to tell whether an account is actually working or just posting.