Here's my pipeline for automatically converting a drawing of a shape into a 3d printed cookie cutter.
Today I printed a cookie-shaped cookie cutter. I photographed a drawing of the shape:
Then I converted this to a curve using MATLAB, robustly created an offset curve, extruded it with a small lip.
I also extrude an slightly more shrunken offset of the curve to make a "stamper" to help push the cookie out of the "cutter" above:
Notice that these are oriented so that they are height fields in the y-direction, making them easy to print with the makerbot. The stamper fits inside, under the lip of cutter.
After 2 hours the printing is done. There are a few errors, but it more or less looks and functions like it should.
Pictures of the cookies to come.
To try it out yourself, download this zip of matlab files and run:
cookie_cookie_cutter
You'll need to grab the winding number (a bit of overkill) code, if you don't already. Then you can try out this completely procedure pipeline on your own shape (curve).
Update: Here's the edible proof:
