Generative Art Challenge: Digital To Physical

This is my  first contribution to the weekly challenge "digital to physical or physical to digital" by sableraph!
I have interpreted the prompt in a very direct way by converting something that is digital to something physical, with the help of my laser cutter. 

The idea was to generate some sort of pattern, export it as an svg and edge it into some piece of wood.
As for the pattern generation, i was inspired by the way vinyl record disk store analog data on a disk by wrapping one big line of information on a disk that the needle then traces over to retrieve said information.
Originally the idea was to take some short audio file, transform it into some form of sine wave function and encode that on a wooden disk similar to how vinyl disk would do it. The emphasis hereby is not that the information would be retrievable but rather the pattern the function would create on the wood.

However, accessing and processing audio data proved to be more difficult then expected and the pattern it created weren't as impressive as originally hoped, so i switched the aim of the project and just tried to create interesting patterns with various functions f(x) where x would increment with each sample point along the spiral. Some of the functions ive tried are:

• sin(x) → wavy spiral
• sin(x) · sin(10x) → waves in waves :O
• x % 2 → sawtooth like function
• sgn(sin(x)) → box function

each creating interesting results on their own which could further be varied by scaling x in different ways.

The lineart alone looked interesting but the laser cutter had some difficulties following my cruely generated svg files that would consist of multiple thousands of lines of raw coordinates that were often overlapping, plus at very high speeds and certain angles, the stepper motors that control the laser head would reach its limit which resulted in jagged lines on some parts of the piece.

Instead of optimizing the svg-generation, i further experimented with the possibilities the patterns could have. one of which was to subdivide the spiral into n segments each having the same amount of points and filling those segments with a random grayscale value. This could then be converted to a png image that the laser cutter interprets as a surface that it engraves, the darker the pixel, the more power the laser will be at this point and the deeper it edges into the wood.

this resulted into very interesting looking patterns where different areas would have a different depth compared to its neighbors and a slightly different color due to the burning of the laser.

As a final piece, i have taken my favorite pattern that i have generated and edged it into a 15x15 cm block of mdf. the different shades from different degrees of burning came to show really nicely even at slight changes and the overall piece has a very unique look (and smell) to it.

View the code here: https://codefile.io/f/HSQULMeNMu
Example for generated SVG (saw tooth wave): https://codefile.io/f/QKeKJgCguy