 Hello, everybody. So now for this next talk, we have a talk by Tuaman, who is a longtime open source design contributor. I'm happy to call him a colleague. He's currently working in the Red Hot open source program office as sort of a jack of all trades and design. And he's here today to talk to you about how to use inkscape for maker processes. All right. Hello. Like what's mentioned, I have a design background on mostly on Gimp and GNOME projects from the early days. And currently working at Red Hot, helping a bunch of the open source projects that are deemed important by Red Hot for the products and services we make and helping the upstream projects with their visual branding and design needs. And I'm proud to say that I'm using inkscape and Linux for all my daily work most of the time. And I think it's, I mean, I have a belief that it's really important to have open tools for, I mean, for opens of projects. It's pretty obvious that you want to be able to open all the files and whoever wants to contribute doesn't need to be depending on like expensive software licenses or anything like that. So if there's an open source tool, it's obvious to earn a very important to use that. And I'm also a private pilot and this is related to my maker processes stuff because I'm interested in all things aviation and also particularly flight simulation. And this takes me to the maker processes thing because what I do for work is kind of like digital stuff. So I don't very often see what comes out of my designs in practice because I make stuff like these shirts and design banners and kind of conference booth elements and graphical things here and there that get printed. But since I don't travel so much for conferences and events myself, it's often that I see a photograph or something or I ask somebody that did everything print out correctly. And there's this kind of element. I mean, you design stuff on the screen and you send it off and then somebody says that they're happy with it and it's great of course. But with these maker stuff, I noticed that it's actually really nice to have something that you hold on your hands and kind of work on that. So this is, and this was also interesting because I was happy to spot that Inkscape is actually quite big on the sort of maker scene because it's a vector graphics program that is kind of a jack of all trades as well. So it's might not be perfect tool for every job but it's kind of good enough for getting things done in a surprising number of places, like for example, laser cutting that I'm using it for myself. And let me see my slide. So here is kind of the stuff that I do myself. So flight simulation, of course, I do physical panels and control consoles because when you simulate the kind of being on airplane and flying, you want to have this sort of immersive environment. And that's why you want to eliminate all the distractions to the physical world because you're trying to make your brain kind of believe that you're actually in a virtual reality. And one of the kind of major drawbacks is that when you have to use the mouse and keyboard to kind of operate the radios and navigation equipment and all those things on an airplane on the screen and that kind of breaks you out of that thing. And then that's why I try to make these sort of physical knobs and switches. And it's also something that I, since I have a real private pilot's license as well, it's also been useful to kind of maintain your proficiency or kind of stay fresh with all the kind of flight processes because when you build these kind of things, you can put the controls and switches kind of like around the right places in the, even if it's like a working work desk or like a computer desk, you can still have certain things on the correct places and you're building the kind of building and maintaining the muscle memory of like where everything is. Then there's this one of the sun-looking things is actually that is a cosplay thing that I was doing with my kid. And on the top left of the slide, you can see this bearing thing because that's from the video game character that's and the sun is actually spinning. So we had to design some sort of bearing for the thing to rotate on. And I whipped out my inkscape and draw this kind of little spinner thing. And then we cut it out of plywood and put a like a skateboard bearing in center and that turned out really nice. So it's practical things, it's fun to do. And I've noticed that inkscape is often, it might be because I'm so used to it that it's the fastest tool to actually whip out and do a design with. But these panels that I do, they basically combine several things. And this is kind of like on the, but at work I have like inkscape. And then I usually use Scribus and maybe some other tools, open source tools to get the design done. And for the maker stuff, I have a bunch of a workflow as well, but it's a bit different. So normally it involves like creating a circuit board for something. And then I use Arduino microcontrollers to kind of interface with the computer. And then a friend of mine, or like I become friends with the people in the community of Mobiflight, which is like open source software for windows that you can run. And then it connects your Arduino and all those knobs and switches to the simulator controls. So whenever you sort of tweak something or press a button or if there's a warning light that comes on up on the cockpit of the simulator airplane, it will turn on the LED on the panel by the Arduino. So it kind of lets, I don't do much programming myself. I mean, I can read a bit and I've done some of basic Arduino stuff, but that kind of thing would be beyond me to interface with another program myself, but I can bring things to life like with Mobiflight, which is pretty great. And it's really nice to see it and also on the traditionally proprietary flight simulator where there's a lot more of stuff now with the recent release of, of course the simulator itself is not open source, but a lot of the kind of add-on things now happen on GitHub. And there's like people are more and more sort of, yeah, of course we do this open source because it makes sense. So things are much more open by default. And then of course the knobs and switches need to be placed somewhere. And it's kind of like the user interface of the gadget or panel is something that I draw in Inkscape myself. And then I take the laser cutter and cut it out from acrylic sheet. And here you can see, for example, a radio panel that I did. So basically I do this thing from two layers. So you can see there's this rectangle and then there's this sort of grooved one which has those cutouts for the mounting screws. And since the real one is shaped a bit like that, I, it's very easy to do it from two layers of kind of sandwiched together. And I'm keeping this on separate layers on Inkscape. And then I use software called K40 Whisperer, which is basically this kind of, that's also open source software because I've got this Chinese laser cutter, which is kind of like a, it's a bit sketchy, but it's cheap and it gets work done. So it's sort of, there's a reason why they're so popular. But also nowadays it's quite common to have this sort of laser cutters available on maker spaces. And I've actually also found one nearby and I'm using it and it's, they have like a bigger, bigger sized laser cutter because this one that I have is kind of like, you can cut like a sheet of paper sized pieces, which works fine for the panels, but then if you want to do something bigger, it's a bit different, more difficult. And since cutting with laser is usually, it's always kind of you use sheet material. So you don't really need any cat kind of features. So it's more like the vector graphics of with Inkscape work really well for that thing. And the K40 Whisperer is basically a open source application that is being used to control these cheap laser cutters because the application that comes with them is such a horrible kind of, I think it's some sort of might even be pirated version of some old kind of variant of Coral Draw that supports laser cutters, but those are kind of really crashy and like difficult to use. So somebody made a open source version that's written in Python and GTK. And it's using Inkscape on the command line on the background. So it loads the file perfectly every time because of course it's done with the same program and that has been working well. So you basically load it up and you can control the laser and press cut and it will determine by the color of the line that, okay, if you want to cut or if you want to engrave, it can do this sort of raster thing that it will cut kind of create the lettering, for example. So if you paint this thing, if you paint the acrylic with a great paint and then you engrave it, it will cut off the paint later, so you will see. And then once I've cut it out, I sand it and paint with the primer and then couple coats of gray. And then when it's done, I'm gonna engrave that thing. And then I assemble things together and then you get something like this, for example, which is basically a switch panel for a simulated airplane. And there are some, you can see the circuit board and the white one on the back. And I put some lights there too, so it will be backlighted if I want. That is basically the end of my slides. There are also some things that are available in Inkscape as well like there's a plugin for cutting, making these sort of boxes that you can put together with these finger joints on the corners that some people might have seen, like some open source projects usually use those for enclosure of something. And I've used that as well sometimes to get a starting point and then of course you can make your own sort of modifications to those with Inkscape if you want to make decorations or like create some extra sort of handles or for example, I created this floor kind of box for this because of course you need to put this panel somewhere. So I created this sort of box that I put next to my chair and then it has two rails where I can mount this. And I started with the box and then I sort of created a bit of a groove to make it look nice. And then I added slots where I wanted to have those the rails. But yeah, this basically it's a rather short talk but I wanted to share this kind of view to the sort of at least for me it was a new kind of different world of doing sort of visual design for things and then discovering that though the same tool is available on the other side of the sort of scene, so on the maker stuff. And it's, I think Inkscape is pretty flexible in that. It's, it might not always be the best tool for something but it still kind of gets the job done. So I've also started to realize that it would be interesting to get more involved in the Inkscape community and sort of have because I have some ideas for how to do these. Like I noticed that the new version is pretty nice. It has new interesting things going on but for example, the smart guides that when you position things, it will snap and maybe you could define some design rules there that you define certain widths that it would always snap so that you could make consistent design easier. But yeah, that was my sharing of what I've been enjoying as my sort of unwinding from work activity. And I'm happy to answer questions if somebody has. So the first one is, is the text also done in Inkscape for the panels? How is the text applied to the physical panel? So the text is also done. So here, for example, you can see the text is done in black and in black, that means on the K4, the Whisperer that it's gonna engrave it. So what it means is that of course you need to position the panel. You cut it first and then you sand and paint. So you need to be able to position them back to the same place. And I do it by cutting the outline of the panel from like this brown cardboard. And then I put it like lock it in place and then I take the cut out kind of cardboard panel out and put the real panel in and then I can have it in kind of position at the same place. And then basically the engraving works like a matrix printer. So it will go line by line sort of. It's kind of makes it into a bitmap and then it goes one line by line and kind of like lighting up the laser wherever there's gonna be a letter and then shutting it off when there's nothing and it will do this kind of dot matrix pattern. And it will, it's a bit slow but it goes through the whole thing and kind of creates this sort of the text. And then do you like wipe white paint into the grooves? Yeah, yeah, that's, thank you. So of course, when you are doing it this yourself you don't realize of course. So the acrylic itself is white. That is the obvious thing of course, yeah. So I have two layers and the top one of them is white and it's kind of like this that it lets the backlight go shine through the light. So it's not like, not translucent but it's pure white but it's still something. I think it's made for this kind of backlit like advertisement and those kind of signs. That's really cool. Okay, so then the next question is do you find it easy to collaborate with other makers open source style? I think it's, well, I mean, I'm at the, I found the Helsinki Hack Lab is quite nice because there are a lot of people who are probably, I mean, people are more open to open source nowadays and it probably depends. I mean, it's kind of a thing that I view it as that of course everybody has their personal choice of like how they want to operate on something on a project that they create. But I think it probably depends on the circles but at least on the flight simulator where there seems to be quite a lot of collaboration. Traditionally, it's being quite like a lot of shareware and sort of kind of free apps but somebody working on something on their garage and then not like open source but it's just like free as no cost. But I'm happy to kind of, I was really happy to find the Mobiflight project because it's open source and then we started to create this sort of designs also as open source to kind of make open hardware and that's something interesting. Great. So next question is, do the various pieces of software you use for the process have a lot of development going on or are they mostly stable and persistent? I guess you are talking about the KiCAD and let me find. So KiCAD is pretty actively developed. There was a new release going on but they are kind of very stable too. So it's not like version 0.1 sort of but KiCAD is 6.0 and there's like a lot of established stuff going on and the new version. I think DigiKey, the electronic component distributor is sponsoring KiCAD. So they're doing quite nicely and then that is kind of moving on and it's also very stable to use. And Inkscape, I was really happy to notice that I was using the kind of 1.0-ish version and then I started to use the kind of the daily builds just because like it's been a while since I was in the bleeding edge of tools and it was surprisingly nice. So I'm really happy with whoever was doing the new layers dialogue and those things. I'm really happy with those things and I love the smart guides that lets you position things like in constant intervals between each other and things. So that's then I'm happy with. And then I'm, FreeCAD is kind of my 3D thing. I think a lot of people are using Fusion 360 which is the Autodesk kind of proprietary thing that has like, I think they have a free tier for makers but it's a bit kind of like, there's two sides, there's like it's crippled in a way or like there are some features that are not, sorry to use the bad words but there are some features are not available for the maker version. And then there's also like you never know what kind of they come up with next. Like there was some case where they, wanted to take out the 3D printing support from the thing and that would have kind of killed the whole, the open kind of maker use, major use case for everybody. So there was a kind of a lot of noise from the community and luckily they didn't do that. But that's why I'm kind of determined to learn to use FreeCAD which is it has a bit of a learning curve for me but I want to use that because I know that it's not gonna go anywhere. That's a good rationale. Okay, so next question and this is the final question. Do you think technical schools are making good use of open source resources? That is a good question. And I think not, but this is kind of like the thing that would be useful to get into. I mean, KiCAD is very kind of major and that probably is somewhere but I'm kind of fearing that there might be some free licenses like everywhere on the academia that people are getting free version of whatever tools that they're kind of learning at school and it might be something that would make sense to have more of these free tools pushed out. But and it probably would give you a lot of good feedback as well. But I'm not kind of, I don't know about that area because my exposure to that is quite limited with the hack lab. Okay, so thank you so much, Thomas. We had a lot of positive comments in the chat. This was a great presentation and it's always nice to see something physical and a lot of us work in digital, like you said. So having something you can actually hold and see is really nice to see it created by these tools. Thanks again, Thomas.