Engraving an award plaque

A friend of from Boy Scouts emailed me this week and asked if I could make an award plaque for her son to present this coming week. I've done plenty of plaques before, but mostly by using closed source software to generate the code. Today, I thought I would try out some of my favorite tools to get the job done-HeeksCNC,QCAD, and cxf2cnc.py.

cxf2cnc.py that can be found here:
cxf2cnc

-This code used to be located on fenn's server, but it seems to be down now. I just put a copy up on google to preserve it.

Anyway, to use this python script you need to edit a string inside the script itself (I know- that's not very user friendly, but that's the way it is for now). There are a few variables to play with and viola! you can run the script like this:

python cxf2cnc.py > output_file_name.ngc

I created a border and 'fluer di le' in Qcad and imported it into HeeksCAD:



I opened up the output_file_name.ngc file in gedit and then pasted in the code created in HeeksCNC. Here it is in emc2/axis:



Here is a finished piece, mounted to a nice mahogany board: