Most of us draw living hinge patterns by hand in CAD and burn through sheet after sheet until the geometry is right. Greylight May has gone the other way and built a web application that calculates and draws customizable living hinges automatically, offered free among several design tools for laser cutter users. The stated aim is to make the world of laser cutters more accessible, and a tool that removes the guesswork from hinge layout seems like a solid way to do that.
The way it is put together is interesting in itself. The maker used the AI model Claude to generate the code for the web application. You navigate to greylightmade.com in the Microsoft Edge browser, pick a laser type, and the default row spacing adjusts based on kerf. The example run entered dimensions of 11 inches by 5 inches, with the CO2 laser kerf set at 0.3mm and the blue diode kerf at 0.1mm. Advanced settings cover a bridge width of 2.5mm, row spacing inputs from 1.5mm to 1.8mm, and a cut length of 25.4mm. The finished SVG downloads and opens in LightBurn, where the full array of cut lines shows up, and the preview window zooms from 25% to 800%.
The part that stands out to me is the purpose: a living hinge turns rigid wood into something that can bend or fold, and the projects behind it are fabricated from sheet wood or plywood, with materials that include electric candles and UV resin.
One open point: the estimated cut time is about 19 minutes at 20 mm/s for that example, which is reasonable for one panel but worth thinking about before scaling a design up. I would also like to hear how the electric candles and UV resin fit into the finished pieces, since that has not been explained yet.
Project by Greylight May. Watch it on their YouTube channel: