So, we needed some trophies for our end of season VEX banquet. I’m a software guy, and like tackling unusual things in odd environments. So I dusted off my Reverse Polish Notation skills, and proceeded to write some trophies.
I should explain.
I have to credit Doug Klein, Affiliate Director PLTW Kentucky at the University of Kentucky. He made some trophies that were given at the Kentucky State HS VEX tournament. He also provided the PDF files that he sent to the laser cutter and the Autocad files he used to design them. My laser cutter couldn’t easily use the files he provided, so I needed to change them a bit. Also, the trophies he made had a “UK” cutout in them. We wanted to replace that with an “EC3” cutout. And, I can’t leave anything alone, so I redid them in an obscure way. Instead of using Autocad, I wrote a postscript program to generate the trophy pieces. I should probably send the postscript programs to @jpearman for archiving, in case anybody ever wants to do this themselves, or alter them.
Team 6135H. I don’t know the number. When I made the trophy plates I didn’t know who was going to get which. And thanks! In my copious free time, I might work up some edge-lit acrylic signs to use as awards.
Okay, I’m going to try to post an excerpt from one of the postscript programs to see if it will display reasonably in the “code” tag. I expect that it won’t.
% calculate length of segment between edge "divots"
% segments and divots look like this:
%\____/\_____/\_____/\_____/
%
/mylen .5 hd 2 mul sub def
% draw 4 segments of the bottom edge
hd 0 moveto
0 1 0 setrgbcolor
1 1 4 {
mylen 0 rlineto
hd hd rlineto
hd -1 hd mul rlineto
} for
% draw pattern gap segment
pg 0 rlineto
% draw 11 segments of bottom edge
1 1 11 {
mylen 0 rlineto
hd hd rlineto
hd -1 hd mul rlineto
} for
% draw pattern gap segment
pg 0 rlineto
% draw 4 segments of bottom edge
1 1 4{
mylen 0 rlineto
hd hd rlineto
hd -1 hd mul rlineto
} for
% add last segment and cutoff corner (half divot?)
mylen 0 rlineto
hd hd rlineto
And as one last indulgence, here’s how that looks in the laser cutter program. The code excerpt above draws the green line (with divots) across the bottom of the trophy back. I cut it in 1/8 inch dark gray acrylic, bent it appropriately, and used stand-offs to attach it to a cut and bent trophy front.
