About Eagle

Eagle is a website to help people find and share stained glass patterns. Often I see people sharing patterns in stained glass groups on Facebook, sometimes as a photo of a piece of paper at an odd angle, followed by a question about resizing it. These posts are almost never stored in a way that would allow them to be found later. It's also fun to see threads where people have made the same pattern and they all share photos with different colors. I wanted to create a community that would enable these interactions and give people high quality patterns.

Who made Eagle?

Eagle was designed and built by me, Stu Kabakoff. It was uses many great projects that I don't have the expertise to build, and many great general purpose building blocks. The import process uses the computer vision libraries OpenCV and potrace. Threads.js makes the import process feel much smoother. The database and back end is built on Strapi, and the UI is made in React using Next.js, and Semantic UI for components.

Eagle started as a set of scripts that I used to divide, count and label pieces. I built a UI to allow me to add color, but originally it would only save patterns locally. I wanted to make it full web app, where you could share patterns, but that project had to wait until I had time to dedicated to it. Fortunately in 2021, I was laid off! After being bummed for about a week, I got working, building the vision I had for years, or at least the parts I could make in the time I had avaiable.

What's next for Eagle?

There are a lot of features I would like to add, but with the limited time I have available, they may take a long time.

• Stars/favorites
• Comments on patterns
• Uploading images of completed pieces
• Editing shapes after import
• Thinning the empty space between pieces
• Allowing patterns to be bought and sold

I am open to new feature ideas, let me know what you'd like to see!

How are you making money?

Right now I'm not trying to monetize Eagle because it runs on a single server that costs just $25 per month. If it becomes popular I will need more servers, storage, databases, and probably some legal advice. At that point it will have to pay its own rent. If that day comes, I will make sure it happens in a way that doesn't degrade the experience; It's been a long time since there's been a millionaire from stained glass patterns, and I don't expect to get there.

I hope you enjoy Eagle, and you find and share some great patterns!

How can I help?

The best way to help right now is to make patterns and upload them! Find a pattern you like and make a cool rendition!

Is Eagle open source?

The full website you are using right now is not open source, but an earlier version is on GitHub.

This version has most of the features of the current version, but lacks the back end. You can still import patterns and store them locally on your computer.