CADD Jigsaw puzzle pattern

I have seen puzzle designs on the USPTO (US patent office) website believe it or not. They would be .tiff files but if you have illustrator maybe you could have it trace the images for you. You will need a .tiff viewer plugin for your browser to see the images.

Of course you could be infringing on somones patent.

Check out these patents:

at

Not legal advice, however it is to my knowledge that one can make up to 25 units of a US. patented device for their own use. You are limited to not sell these devices for 'profit'. There are no 'Patent Police', it is up to the patent holder to locate infringements.

FWIW. 'Coke' and 'Pepsi' submitted incomplete formulae's for their product as 'Patent Pending' and continued to do so for years. Same protection as a patent without making the entire details public information. There are people that hang around the patent office waiting for new items to become public information, in turn they sell these ideas to foreign manufactures and promoters located where the US. patent protection is not recognized.

Did you ever solve this? I have a neat little plug in for Adobe Photoshop that lets me create puzzles. I can't save it to DWG or DXF though. I'll post an example in JPG format at a.b.p.w. Let me know if you can use something like that, I'll try to help out. It can be set to any number of rows and columns.

Lucias

If you can post a decent JPG, I can turn it into a DXF.

CW...

Is there a software conversion, or are you ofering to do this the hard way?

I spend too much of my time doing jpg --> DXF conversions manually...

I'm sure I could redo it in much higher resolution, or in a number of other formats. I only posted that as an example to see if it was the type of thing the original poster was looking for. Let me know if you want me to try again.

Lucias

Good stuff! Two operations that eat too much of my time:

My CAD program does allow me to import image files; but to carve the images I want with my CNC equipment, I have to spend a fair number of hours re-drawing (tracing) the image manually.

Is there a (preferably free, of course :-) package that'll do this for me?

be necessary - but even a just halfway decent first approximation may save a /lot/ of work.

there are plenty of raster-to-vector packages out there, at a range of price points and optimized for various industries....

Lucias,

Please contact me at mwrinken at gmail dot com

I'd love to get this program from you. I'm thinking I can take the graphic into Illustrator and export the image to paths, then saving it to a DWG format for use in AutoCAD.