Hacker News

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

42 points by surprisetalk 3 days ago | 21 comments

Fwirt 3 hours 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 2 hours 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 50 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.

jerf 13 minutes ago

For anyone thinking of this, I promise to be suitably impressed (defined as "upvoting it when I see it on Hacker News") if anyone does manage to get a true G-code quine in this sense. Go for it.

robofanatic 4 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 3 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_ 2 hours 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, no intrinsic text labels, etc.) I think the remaining rule/clue is "Move the dot-nub towards whatever you want." So moving right is indicating you like the "We track you" text, while moving left indicates some kind of disagreement.

_____________________

> It feels intentionally misleading.

The "Accept All" button is worse:

1. It abuses UI conventions of position and color so that it appears like a "Proceed with the configuration shown" button.

2. The text-label is likewise ambiguous: It could mean "Accept All [of the choices which I've made and can see]", which the user already expected from color and placement. However instead it means "Reject whatever is on-screen, and reset every discrete option to 'accept' cookies."

3. When it does reset all those your choices, it does so in a secretive way by also dismissing the dialog. The user never has any opportunity to realize that it just erased their choices and flipped every item to the rightmost position.

Any one might be an innocent mistake, but all three sins is a dark-pattern.

NDlurker 2 hours ago

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

CobrastanJorji 22 minutes ago

Don't print the braille document directly. Instead, I suggest printing a braille embosser. Think Gutenberg press. Then use that to press braille lettering onto a sheet of paper.

Although if you just want one sheet, I guess you could use the print directly, but maybe don't use PLA since it'd be kinda sharp and unpleasant to run your finger over.

yjftsjthsd-h 49 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 49 minutes ago

kibwen 4 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 3 hours 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 3 hours 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)

WillAdams 2 hours ago

_If_ one is using a firmware which supports that.

Grbl, which many of the 3D printer firmwares are based on, does not (and no variables, or loops, or branching).

myself248 2 hours ago

And weirdly, neither does Klipper, despite having all the resources in the world to do so. Just not a priority since slicers don't produce code like that, and 99.999% of Klipper's job is to eat whatever a slicer sends it.

So suppose I attached an extruder to a Haas mill or something...

philipallstar 3 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 3 hours 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 3 hours 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."

CobrastanJorji 20 minutes ago

"Some percentage of the time."

NegativeLatency 4 hours ago

Compression could be interesting

dyauspitr 2 hours ago

[dead]