Street Map Wood Inlay

I saw these wood map inlays online and wanted to make my own using the laser cutter at Techshop SF.  I found a street map of seattle and used it to generate a vector file, which I then laser cut and stained.  Eventually I would like to glue this map together and use it as the surface of a coffee table.

Step 1: Design

Unfortunately you cannot export vector files straight off of google maps, and I couldn't find a great alternative anywhere else online (of seattle specifically).  So I went to woodcutmaps.com and used their online map generator to create my own map.  I took a screen shot of the final map and imported it into photoshop.
A word of warning here- I spent waaay too many hours getting this map right in photoshop.  It's mostly my own fault for being a perfectionist, just be aware that it will take a lot of tweaking to get the results I did (you can download my eps file below).
Basically my process was to compile the screenshot from woodcutmaps with a few screen shots from google maps (for extra detail), and use the magic wand tool to extract three layers- water, street, and land from the images. I used the "refine edge" option of the magic wand to make sure I was generating smooth, high-contrast edges.  I also ended up using the line and rectangle tools to draw in a fair amount of the streets by hand.
Eventually I ended up with three layers of color (fig 7).  I exported each layer as a png and imported them in illustrator.  I used the live trace function in illustrator to generate outlines of the shapes and export as eps (attached below).

Comments

[A.J.B.]

Every time I see an awesome techshop post like this, I wish there were one here in Orange County. So many projects I could do. Great work.

[amandaghassaei]

have you checked for local hackerspaces? sometimes they have laser cutters

[dominicburke2000]

I use Inkscape for all my laser jpg to vector. Its free and also the only free example i could find. the one cool this you can generate vectors using multiple scans on either colour, or edge detection making it very quick to make a file like above. Search google for the link, once installed you click "path" on the top row and then trace bitmap.
Hope this helps

[Carleyy]

This came out so well!