FlightLabFoam
I don’t know how I feel about putting a vibe coded project on a list of “my projects”. It seems slightly disingenuous. I ultimately decided to put it here because of how useful it’s been. Different classes, capstone projects, and clubs at BYU have been using an old commercial software for foam cutting for years. While the original program was capable, its age was showing. The program was continually glitching. It has so many settings that frequently students and TAs would miss important settings and screw up cuts. The program didn’t have the ability to save a cutting project (in case you needed to regenerate g-code). Because it’s proprietary, students had to come in to the lab to generate g-code (and couldn’t come to appointments prepared to cut). Even if they used the trial version of the program, it was only available on Windows.
FlightLabFoam addresses all of that. Students can easily download the webapp and use it regardless of their operating system. Students can drop in their flightlab files directly; they don’t have to manually enter their analyzed aircraft. Changing cutting settings is straightforward, intuitive, and most importantly, only needs to be done in one place. Cutting settings have defaults that produce reliable results for the BYU foam cutter. If someone else wanted to use FlightLabFoam, the defaults are easily changed in settings. Honestly, after hours of dealing with the previous software, I just feel really proud of this simple fix.