Hi, I'm John Flower from Palmerston North, New Zealand. This website contains a portfolio of projects that I've completed, along with my professional history.

19 August 10

3d lasers engrave point clouds into crystal. To engrave a photo it must be converted into black and white. My initial workflow was to create an 8 bit grey scale image in GIMP and then convert it into a 2 bit, black and white, bitmap using a package called 2d Photo, then into DibSlice or LaserImage to create a point cloud. I'm now able to skip 2d Photo by creating the black and white image in GIMP.

05 July 10

The software, LaserImage 3.0, that came with works, Trophy Specialists & Engraving, Lelee brand laser doesn't do nice proofs. So I'm making a virtual stage in Blender (this software is free :). This post is just to show my progress so far. To render a point cloud I'm using particles and setting the type to hair. By making the hair short I can give the effect of points in a crystal. Another way to do this might be to use dupliverts. The blender file I've uploaded doesn't have hair, this is to keep the filesize down.

26 June 10

I've found an SVG wysiwyg called SVG Edit. You can download the source and host it yourself, or you can do as I've done and embed it in an iFrame using

<iframe src="http://svg-edit.googlecode.com/svn/tags/stable/editor/svg-editor.html"
width="600" height="600"></iframe>

26 June 10

At work, we've now got a new laser. It creates 3d images in crystal by, rapidly, firing a single laser. The crystal shatters at the focal point to create a permanent white dot. The laser has a working Z focal range of about 80mm. Because some crystals are of awkward dimensions the laser has an adjustable table. When the table is adjusted, I have to manually adjust the Z centre of engraving. This calculation has to take into account the refractive index of air. Sometimes I also want a greater margin below the image, so that it looks 'right'.

Formula = Height of crystal / 2 - H * 1.52

18 February 10

Scalable Vector Graphics are part of the web standard. They are line drawings that can be enlarged without losing quality. The fonts on your screen are a similar format. Tap Ctrl + a few times and you'll see that the text still looks sharp (Ctrl 0 will restore your settings), yet my face becomes pixelated. If you're using any browser except IE and you'll see a picture of a Raven below. Try zooming in on that, you'll find it keeps it's sharpness. That is the benefit of SVG, along with smaller file sizes.

28 January 10

Cloning nodes saves time! I've had 177 product nodes to create and was able to shorten the task by cloning. Cloning works by copying an existing node and presenting you with an edit node where you can change the relevant details. In this case each node had common attributes such as 'Base colour' and 'Engraveable material'. Instead of manually entering these and their photos I only had to change the title of the node and upload the relevant product picture.

To do this I used two Drupal modules:-

08 January 10

AudioField, version 6.x-1.0-beta1, did not show any players after I installed it in Drupal. After looking through the code I found that the developer had used sloshes, \\\\\, instead of slashes, /////. By switching them I was able to make the module work.

30 December 09

Here's a form from an exercise in Chapter 2 of PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites. Once you click the submit button the data you enter will be displayed on the screen. Later on I'll learn how save it to a database and have a copy emailed to an address.

29 December 09

PHP is the backbone of Drupal. I want to learn it so that I can alter the output of some of Drupal's modules. Particularly Ubercart. On http://trophy.co.nz/ when viewing a product I'd like to have a dynamic gallery of engraved examples. This can be done. I did it for the gallery photos like the one on the right. But in the product nodes the photos would be in the wrong place because Ubercart places the attributes after the CCK fields. So I left them off. Knowing a bit of PHP would help me to put them in the right place!

05 December 09

Things are quieter than usual at work (Trophy Specialists) and its time to look at other ways to make money. So I've been putting together a website to help serve our customers better, help my colleagues through an up to date catalogue, and to get new leads. I've been using Drupal + Ubercart. Problems with these are:-

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