See these two articles:
- Installation, article and pictures courtesy of SCYA
- Project from start to end, article and pictures courtesy of SCYA Community Project
Patchwork of paintings, residents reaction
Heartland community project: wall patchwork of acrylic panels with paintings
Installation of panels
Zoom on one very colorful panel, accurate reproduction of original painting
Latest additions to our team and equipment: a Big Boy
George You, Plixo's Printing Production Manager & Color Guru
And a Big Baby 
2m wide custom laminator and Plixo team in action
So ready for Big Jobs at 2m width, will all stages in-house: image preparation, printing, lamination, mounting and installation
To all our customers,
We wish to apologize if you faced difficulties reaching us by phone the last few days. Due to [my guess] construction going on opposite our building, our office phone line was out of order most of the time. It seems to be fixed by now so eager to get your calls again
Freshly laser cut and engraved in plywood here are front panels for audio systems, courtesy of Benjy Choo from Kilo (www.kilo.sg), who designed them and come to us to see if our laser cutting can be intricate enough while still affordable for his lovely designed panels.
I was a little bit anxious at first when I saw the drawing with so many small holes so near of each other. But from entering our workshop to the panels ready took less than 20mns, and the end result is amazing.
I personally love this one with the logo cut as a grid of holes with LED lighting in the back
Design and Pictures by Benjy Choo , www.kilo.sg
Just added price for framing [sandwich acrylic/plywood] and mounting on 2x5mm foambard in http://www.plixo.com.sg/poster-printing.html for convenience.
Dear Customers, suppliers, friends and more
We will close the factory from December 23rd evening to January 2nd.
If any urgent jobs, let us know soon as possible so we can try to cater to them.
Merry Christmas to all, thank you for your continuous support and for your help in driving and inspiring us to provide wider and better services.
Alexis Martial
Managing Director.
Thanks to our customers requests, we qualified the following materials for laser cutting and engraving:
Photos to come soon
At Plixo, we helped Kuan to make his project for an exhibition to become a reality.
This involved intricate laser cutting and accurate machining.
More at Plixo website.
For the last two years, we have manually checked and amended customers drawing sto ensure we cut the parts in the right order, i.e. the inside 1st.
Typical example is with letters like O, g, e etc.
I finally decided to tackle this issue to optimize productivity, reduce manual errors and allow our team to do more value-added of their precious time.
Good thing with CorelDraw is you can program your own macros in VBA, quite extensive sets of objects, pethods and properties, and reasonable performance.
Looking over internet, I found I was not the only one searching for this, but only a few full commercial solution were available.
So I coded it myself. Find below my 1st attempt.
Seems to work OK for only one level of inside shapes [by design] .
Will improve it when get more free time since most of our case are one level only so should solve the issue of my operator in 95% of the cases.
The main steps are:
1st stage:
- ungroup
- convert to curves
- break apart
2nd stage:
- parse all shapes and check if they intersect with eachother. If they intersect then either their intersection is equal to one of them i.e. this one is the fully included i.e. the hole, or the opposite, or it’s a real intersect that I don’t handle for now
3rd stage:
- in my case I change the outline color since this is used by the laser cutter to determine the order. Feel free to change to your own need.
Minimal error checking, no user interface for now.
Code:
Private Function POutlineInsideCurves(rangeToParse As ShapeRange, insideColor As Color) As ShapeRange
Dim s As Shape
Dim ss As Shape
Dim si As Shape
Dim sBreak As ShapeRange
Dim sCurves As New ShapeRange
Dim results As New ShapeRange
Dim i As Integer
Dim j As Integer
Dim count As Integer
‘Ungroup all 1st
Set rangeToParse = rangeToParse.UngroupAllEx
‘ Parse all shapes, put them as curves and break them
For Each s In rangeToParse
Select Case s.Type
Case cdrCurveShape
Case cdrRectangleShape, cdrEllipseShape
s.ConvertToCurves
Case cdrTextShape
s.ConvertToCurves
Case Else
‘ Should raise an error and display error message here
End Select
Set sBreak = s.BreakApartEx
sCurves.AddRange sBreak
Next s
‘ Parse all broken shapes and find which are insides
count = sCurves.count
For i = 1 To count
Set s = sCurves(i)
s.Fill.ApplyNoFill
For j = i + 1 To count
Set ss = sCurves(j)
Set si = s.Intersect(ss, True, True)
If si Is Nothing Then
‘ Nothing to do, no intersect
Else
If si.Curve.Area = s.Curve.Area Then
results.Add s
Else
If si.Curve.Area = ss.Curve.Area Then
results.Add ss
Else
‘ objects partial overlap so should display error message since can’t easily handle this case, for now just skip it
End If
End If
si.Delete
End If
Next j
Next i
‘ Parse all inside curves and change colors of them
For Each s In results
s.Outline.SetProperties -1, , insideColor
s.OrderToFront
Next s
Set POutlineInsideCurves = results
End Function
Public Sub OutlineInsideCurves()
Dim saveUnit As cdrUnit
Dim saveOptimizeState As Boolean
Dim slanted As Boolean
Dim Spacing As Double
Dim insideColor As Color
Dim sr As ShapeRange
saveOptimizeState = Application.Optimization
saveUnit = ActiveDocument.Unit
Application.Optimization = True
On Error GoTo cleanState
ActiveDocument.BeginCommandGroup “Outline Inside Curves”
Set insideColor = CreateRGBColor(0, 255, 0)
Set sr = POutlineInsideCurves(ActiveSelectionRange, insideColor)
cleanState:
ActiveDocument.EndCommandGroup
ActiveDocument.Unit = saveUnit
Application.Optimization = saveOptimizeState
ActiveWindow.Refresh
End Sub
Actually, I’ve started writing a few extra macros, greatly inspired by the fantastic job of Alex and James [will let you find who they are 
]
The plan is to distribute these macros for free when we will have a full set of them, and work on doing improved/faster one in C/C++ for professional use and sell them for a fee + include them with a line of laser cutter we hope to design in the next years, most probably based on an opensource design greatly scaled up ;-:
Alexis Martial
Managing Director and Crazy Encoder, Plixo
