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Risto A. Paju

I've always found circuit boards aesthetically inspiring, and in recent years this fascination has turned into a number of PCB-styled demos. I think a key inspiration for these has been the "Absolut Intelligence" vodka advert a couple of decades ago.

I haven't done these in a while, but a week or two ago I ran into spanning trees. I noticed that spanning trees of square lattices can make rather nice impersonations of printed circuits, especially when the solder points are only put on leaf points. Cut the tree up into a forest, and it's making even more electrical sense.

Halftoning isn't new to me either, but my existing line-based techniques didn't look nice on the square PCB lattice. It had to be more blocky with exactly horizontal or vertical lines. So for this iteration, I've set each half-edge to have a constant width — a natural evolution of my earlier variants, which were built from half-edge sections. Of course, the solder points follow a similar areal scaling.

@algoristo This made me want to see the image intensity modulated by changing the density of traces, rather than the trace brightness.

@skewray I basically did that in the previous post, though it was more randomized and not in PCB style. It would be interesting to do a PCB version of that, though, I'll have a look.

Also, this latest idea varies trace width, but of course with all the downscaling it turns into trace brightness :/