The Shaper TRACE frame and pen. The Shaper TRACE tool, and pen. This simple device is placed over your drawing, and a phone camera converts it into vectors.

A company called SHAPER, located in San Francisco, invented an amazing set of digital tools for artists, furniture designers, and makers that allow them to do precision CNC routing in a whole new way. I have been involved with the company's products since their first Kickstarter campaign in 2012. Since then, the company has been acquired by Festool, a leading high quality German woodworking and construction power tool manufacturer.

The tools Shaper created:

ORIGIN, a hand-controlled CNC router that precisely follows cut paths without a giant CNC machine. Instead, it is the size of a typical wood cutting router, and reads Shaper Tape.
SHAPER TAPE, a roll of consumable special dotted tape that looks like dominoes and is laid out on a workpiece. The Shaper Origin reads these dots.
WORKSTATION, a clamping jig with permanent domino patterns on it that allows for holding small pieces and vertical ends of wood so complex joinery can be cut.
PLATE, a flat frame-like surface with permanent domino patterns on it that allows for flat surfaces to be precisely machined.
TRACE, a small frame with permanent domino patterns on it that allows any modern cellphone to instantly capture hand drawn art, and then convert it directly into SVG (scalable Vector Graphics), which can be used with any vector program or CNC device that reads SVG.

All of the tools listed are used directly with the Shaper Origin. However, the TRACE tool can also be used with ANY digital tool, including laser cutters (like the Glowforge we have in the classroom), other CNC routers, the Cricut smart cutting machine, and vector based computer programs like Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, and more.

The capturing is done through any modern web browser on the phone, which needs to access the phone's primary camera. The TRACE tool I purchased is registered only to my Shaper account and cannot be used with any other Shaper account, or accessed - except by my logging in. Therefore, my phone will be the only one used to do the capturing,

If you would like to use the TRACE tool to capture your module patterns and have it convert the image directly into an SVG, please ask. Once we have captured your file, it can be uploaded to my Dropbox folder, which you can access through the link below.

Here is my Dropbox folder: ---TRACE---, which you can access to retrieve your traced files.