happiness0067

What's the long-term support plan for dead man's switch? What happens if for example you meet an untimely fate? It seems that you will need to support storing information on a years or decades time scale right off the bat.

I ask because I was recently thinking about how to preserve information for the future like this

As in they put bags of unmixed cement in the chute?

Very exciting on the playhouse. What kind of things will it have?

I'm expecting my first this year so have a ways to go before I get to work on that project

Relateable. If I had a dollar for every time I ran into issues with time zones, that would be a profitable strategy in and of itself.

I'm building out https://measuretocut.com, which started as a tool for myself to help with planning board cuts (and now sheet cuts). It calculates how much material you need for your project and gives you a plan for the materials and shows all the cuts you need to make and where to make them.

First release was in December for 1D cuts. Last month I released sheet cutting for 2D cut calculation. It's been working well for my own projects and it started getting consistent daily users since my last update in February. You can save projects now on the site for you to come back to later.

Any feedback is welcome. I'm always looking for what features to add next.

I felt very similar, and then I was putting up trim in my dining room and had to make my 3th trip to The hardware store in about 36 hrs haha

I built https://measuretocut.com after too many DIY projects ended with another trip to the hardware store. It figures out how much material you actually need and how to cut it to minimize waste or costs. When I released it in December it just handled 1D cuts for things like boards, bars, and pipes. You enter what you need, and it lays everything out visually on stock lengths. This morning I released the 2D sheet cut calculator to do cut plans for plywood and similar sheet materials. Any feedback is welcomed from fellow engineers turned woodworkers!

Been working on sheet cutting optimization for https://measuretocut.com today and it sent me straight down the cutting‑stock / 2D bin‑packing rabbit hole. What started as “wouldn’t it be nice if the site could tell you how to cut your wood sheets optimally?” turned into reading about NP‑hard problems and flipping through old operations research papers like I was cramming for an exam.

The funny part is how far the mathematical version of the problem is from what measuretocut.com actually needs to output. In reality you have kerf, ugly offcuts, and the fact that nobody wants a cutting diagram that looks like a circuit board. We really have to take into consideration a 2nd optimization, it needs to be an output that a person in a shop can glance at and immediately understand.

Glad it can of use! You're welcome to share any feedback!

I ended up making a side project for my side project and built MeasureToCut: https://measuretocut.com

I moved last year and started a bunch of DIY projects, and each one turned into a bunch of drawings on napkins and backs of receipts to figure out how much wood/material I needed to buy to avoid "one more trip to store". It tells you how much of a stock material you need, and shows you how to cut it, to minimize waste or minimize cost.

A few details

1D: works for boards, pipes, bars, etc. You enter lengths and quantities; it details the cuts onto the stock material.

2D (coming soon): will work for plywood and sheet goods and lets you see how your parts tile onto sheets.

Apparently the software engineer to woodworking pipeline is actually just a circle