Hi Hackers! Thanks for your interest. The site is back up now, but unpredictably so if traffic spikes again. In the meantime, here's a stable link to a saved PDF of the page: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/hcs.pdf.
I like these kinds of scientific/mathematic explorations that relate to craft. The article on mad weave also sounds interesting (unfortunately it's not open access).
It's strange to think that with all the research that has gone into 2D weave patterns, I have yet to see any real application of it come out of the PCB dielectric industry.
One nice aspect of the Shepard sampler is how she uses the same base pattern for all the tiles, which makes the differences between the symmetries very clear even to layman such as me.
Yeah, in the end I decided that I didn't have the time or experience to design a single unified theme for the whole piece. To some extent I also don't really have enough resolution in my grid -- some symmetry groups might not have ended up with very many translations of the motif.
The closeup picture of the open hexagonal weave fabric looks eerily similar to a design I cut into the flywheel of a (rejected) battlebot I built.
I intended each straight section to act like a tension element, and a tri-axial pattern with large open hexagonal holes seemed to me to be the most efficient design.
