Method and apparatus for cutting mosaic tile
AssigneeArtaic, LLC
InventorsEdward Acworth, Paul Heslinga, Stephen Nestinger, Alan Argondizza
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A mosaic tile design and manufacturing system is comprised of a mosaic design application, a network server and a tile cutting apparatus. A mosaic artist can use the mosaic design application to specify the placement, color and shapes of a plurality of mosaic tile comprising a mosaic design. The tile shapes can be a combination of standard and non-standard shapes, and the design tool can generate instructions that can be applied by the server to the tile cutting apparatus to control the cutting apparatus to make custom tile cuts that result in a tile with a non-standard shape.
Claims9
A mosaic tile cutting system, comprising:
- a mosaic design application operating to generate information relating to a geometric shape and dimensions for each one of a plurality of non-standard mosaic tiles within a free-form mosaic tile design;
- the mosaic design application operating on the geometric shape and dimension information, corresponding to each one of the plurality of the non-standard tiles, to calculate one or more tile stock advancement distances and one or more associated tile stock cutting angles, and compiling the calculated tile stock advancement distances and associated cutting angles into a series of computer instructions;
- and
- a computational device, linked to a mosaic tile cutting apparatus, operating on the series of computer instructions comprising the tile cutting program to control the mosaic tile cutting apparatus to advance the tile stock the calculated distance and to make one or more cuts to the tile stock at the calculated cutting angle to form each one of the one or more non-standard tiles;
- wherein the mosaic tile cutting apparatus comprises a mosaic tile stock advancement mechanism, a tile stock stabilizer and a rotatable tile stock cutting head and the tile stock stabilizer is controlled to grip two opposing lateral edges of the mosaic tile stock and the tile cutting head is controlled to rotate and cut the mosaic tile stock during substantially the same period of time.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.