Four new free laser tools: family crossword, birth stat sign, sound wave, and map art

I added four new free tools this week. They all do the same basic thing from different angles: you give them an input you already have — names, birth details, an audio clip, or an address — and they hand you back a laser-ready SVG you can engrave or cut without fighting the software. Here's what each one does and why I built it.

Family Crossword Generator

Type your family members' names, one per line, and the tool interlocks them into a crossword puzzle. Each letter gets its Scrabble tile value in the corner. Optional surname above or below, optional family-tree silhouette on the side, optional cut border. The preview updates live while you change the cell size, gap, corner radius, and font.

The reason this one took longer than it should have is that I wanted the letters to actually cut cleanly. If you just render each letter as a font glyph, overlapping strokes double-burn on fill engraving and hollow counters get filled in. So the tool vectorizes each letter with opentype.js, then unions all the contours with Clipper before output. The result is one clean path per word — no doubled strokes, holes preserved correctly.

Download is a zip with three files: a plain SVG, a LightBurn .lbrn2 project with Cut/Score/Engrave layers pre-configured, and an xTool Creative Space .xcs file with the same three operations split out so you can set power and speed per layer without guesswork.

Birth Stat Sign Generator

Enter baby's name, date, time, weight, length, and an optional hospital or city. Pick a plaque size (5x7, 8x10, or 11x14), pick a font, optionally add a cut border with rounded corners. Download gets you the same three-file bundle.

I built this specifically because my wife kept asking me to make these for friends' babies and I was tired of laying out the same layout in LightBurn every time. Now it's three text fields, a size dropdown, and a download. The layout scales with the plaque size so an 11x14 doesn't have the text swimming in whitespace.

Eleven fonts to pick from, including a few script options for parents who want something flowing and a few block options for parents who want something modern. Font size is adjustable 60-150% in case your name runs long and you need the stats a little tighter.

Sound Wave Generator

This one's pure browser — nothing uploaded anywhere. Drop in an audio file (MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, FLAC) and the tool decodes it with the Web Audio API, computes the waveform envelope, and renders it as an SVG ready for laser engraving or cutting.

Three styles: vertical bars with capsule caps, a flowing smooth line, or a mirrored filled silhouette. The waveform math is a bit more careful than the obvious approach. If you just take the absolute peak per bucket, one loud spike in a quiet song dominates the whole shape. Instead the tool blends RMS with peak, applies a moving-average smoothing pass, and runs the result through a gamma curve so quiet sections have real presence on the finished piece.

The line and mirror styles use Catmull-Rom splines converted to cubic bezier curves, so you get actually flowing curves instead of zigzag line segments. For wedding vows, first-dance songs, or a kid saying 'I love you, dad' — this is the tool. Add the song title or date as a caption and print it alongside.

Street Map Art Generator

Type an address or a landmark. The tool geocodes it, fetches the street network (and water, and optionally buildings) from OpenStreetMap, and renders a clean SVG street map centered on that spot. Pick your shape — square, portrait, landscape, or circle. Pick radius from 300m to 5km. Toggle which features you want.

The road widths are tuned so motorways look heavier than side streets without becoming cartoonish. Water engraves as a filled polygon. Everything clips cleanly to whatever shape you picked. There's an optional cut border with rounded corners, and an optional caption so you can print the coordinates or the city name underneath.

This one has infrastructure behind it that you don't see. OpenStreetMap's free Overpass API is slow if you hit it cold and fragile if you hammer it, so every request goes through a shared cache with 14-day TTLs, a global origin rate budget, and stampede locks so concurrent requests for the same area don't multiply the load. Popular cities are pre-cached so they load instantly. If you search somewhere obscure, the first hit takes 10-20 seconds — then it's cached for two weeks.

OpenStreetMap attribution is required (you can toggle whether to include it on the exported SVG — it's always shown on the page). Use these for commercial work too; OSM data is open.

Why free?

Some of these took real time to build. The crossword alone went through a few rewrites before the letter union worked. But they're all small, focused generators — you put one input in, you get one output out. They're not the kind of thing I'd charge for. The paid products on this site are the jigs, the designs, and the monogram builder, where the value is the library and the layout work, not the generation itself.

These four are on the tools page alongside the settings database, vectorizer, rotary calculator, and the others. If they save you a layout session, great. If they make a first-time maker feel like they actually made something real, better.