Fermat-Spirals

Connected Fermat Spirals are a space filling curve that could be used for additive manufacturing. The algorithm is presented in this paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2897824.2925958.

The goal of this project is to implement the algorithm as presented in the paper and ultimately use this algorithm to generate a fill pattern for 3D printing.

Installation Instructions

The code was developed on Python 3.8. It requires a few third party libraries to run:

Shapely: https://pypi.org/project/Shapely/
OpenCV: https://opencv.org/
Matplotlib: https://matplotlib.org/
Numpy: https://numpy.org/
Cvxpy: https://www.cvxpy.org/

These can all be installed using the "requirements.txt" file, except for cvxpy. This library should be manually installed using the install from source instructions found here: https://www.cvxpy.org/install/index.html.

Execution Instructions

The code can be executed either through the "Fermat Spiral Paper" Jupyter Notebook, or through main.py using the CLI.

Command Line Interface

The code can be run with this command. Note the filename and distance are required inputs:

python3 main.py filename distance

There are optional commands that can be used to control the desired output of the program. They are listed below:

Mutually Exclusive (choose one):

-s: runs spiral path generation
-fs: runs fermat spiral path generation
-cfs: runs connected fermat spiral path generation

Optional Arguments:

-o: enables optimization
-p: displays plot of paths using matplotlib
-g "filename.gcode": writes gcode of output to input filename
-m: prints dictionary of calculated metrics of path

An example command that opens "picture.png" from the local directory, runs fermat spiral generation at distance = 2, uses optimization, displays a plot of the path, and outputs a gcode file to "temp.gcode" in the local directory.

python3 main.py "picture.png" 2 -fs -o -p -g "temp.gcode"

Example Results:

Here is a plot of a CFS path of the wolf:

References