3D-printed book turns its own G-code into raised lettering

3D-printed book turns its own G-code into raised lettering(designboom.com)

35 points by surprisetalk 2 days ago | 15 comments

Fwirt 1 hour ago |

I'm sure the idea here was a physical quine, although since it only contains 2.5% of its own G-code it's not really a quine, any more than a "Hello World" program is a quine since the string "Hello World" is in the program text. It would be trivial to generate something like this depending on which part of the G-code you pick.

LeifCarrotson 57 minutes ago | |

Many G-code dialects contain subprogram calls, loops, and conditionals that seem like they'd permit a physical quine. The standard RepRap firmware breaks the rules by taking input:

https://reprap.org/wiki/G-code#M98:_Call_Macro.2FSubprogram

but Fanuc and other dialects allow M97 to call a subroutine chained to the end of a program.

Fwirt 3 minutes ago | | |

G-code is like assembly language for CNC. It’s human readable, you can write it by hand if necessary, most machines will compile it internally to machine instructions, and there are a million different flavors with incompatible macros, etc. The flavor I’m most familiar with is Klipper’s interpreter, which will let you write macros, but that would technically be cheating since you could just stuff an entire program into a macro.

robofanatic 2 hours ago |

Is anyone else confused by thier cookie consent banner? The switches start out gray and become black when toggled. which position means consent? It feels intentionally misleading.

albert_e 2 hours ago | |

This is how you get statutory warning labels and nutrtion information labels on packages.

Because these folks always want to do the least legal thing allowed by law.

Terr_ 20 minutes ago | |

> The switches start out gray and become black when toggled.

Rant: That type of slider-switch is an inferior usurper of the classic tickbox, that rode in on a wave of touch-screen-ification. Oh, it can be done well, sometimes, but it's just far too easy to do it badly.

In this case (useless colors, not other labels) I think the implicit rule/clue is "Move the dot-nub towards what you want." Therefore moving right is indicating you like the "I'm gonna do X to you" text-line, and moving left indicates you don't.

> It feels intentionally misleading.

The dark-pattern behind that "Accept All" button is worse:

1. It abuses color and positioning rules make it look like the button you pick to continue with what the screen already shows.

2. Its text-phrasing exploits the ambiguity between "Enable All" versus "Continue with your choices."

3. When it activates, it does so in a hidden manner. You don't see all the sliders moving from left to right, and you have no chance to confirm that it's what you wanted.

NDlurker 1 hour ago |

Cool idea for printing braille. I bet I could vibe code a program to convert .epub files to braille then to printable copies.

yjftsjthsd-h 2 minutes ago | |

I've also been idly contemplating 3D printing braille. Somewhat annoying that that's the cheap+easy option, but if it works...

ramity 2 minutes ago | |

kibwen 2 hours ago |

> Manual contains only 2.5 percent of its own G-code in its first version. That low figure is part of the point. Current FFF 3D printing resolution and text scale place limits on how much code can fit onto the object while also describing the volume of the object itself. A fully self-contained version would enter an endless loop, since every printed mark would add more data to be described.

The fact that quines exist means that it must be possible to print a fully self-describing book of this sort, though it's possible that you'd require a more expressive language.

trumpdong 1 hour ago | |

There's probably a way to make an xz file that decompresses to g-code for itself. But plain g-code is not powerful enough because it's just a list of movements due the tool head to perform - no computation.

serf 1 hour ago | | |

`M98` allows for essentially function calls (nested or not.)

If you had a part of a machine that could save state (say.. turning on a coolant pump..) I wonder how much more of a turing machine you could wrastle into it.

(or you could just cheat and use one of the hundreds of gcode variants that have computational stuff stapled into them like the Fanuc equivalents, but that's sorta dishonest for the exercise)

philipallstar 2 hours ago | |

It's fascinating how revered people are who talk in metaphor and implication like this about relatively simple things, when far more complicated things are happening all the time inside their devices.

izonu 1 hour ago | |

G-code by itself only describes the series of motor movements over time, though I think it would be practically feasible to have a book contain an executable script, which would generate the same g-code as the one used to print the book. It would be really interesting to see how large the resulting book is.

isoprophlex 1 hour ago | |

"This prompt, when fed to a sufficiently capable LLM, will generate the G-code to produce a 3D printed model of a book containing this quote, verbatim, in raised letters."

NegativeLatency 2 hours ago | |

Compression could be interesting