Laser cut halftone stencil

Here's an experiment I did to create a spraypaint stencil with halftone images. The idea is to take a greyscale image and create a stencil that can be cut on the laser cutter. Here's the original image:

Next you create a halftone image. They key thing here is a that all the dots have to have be evenly spaced, otherwise the stencil will fall apart. The halftone filter in photoshop would not work in this instance as it would produce a halftone image where many of the dots are clumped together. I used a plugin for illustrator called Phantasm CS to achieve the ideal result, it's especially useful as the it outputs vector shapes which are perfect for laser cutting. You could however create your own solution for this, check out this thread on Processing.org or the imageLoaderExample included with OpenFrameWorks for some hints on how code something similar yourself.

Here's a detail of the image used to cut out the stencil.