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November 25, 2009

OpenSCAD: Constructive solid geometry CAD at long last

My first introduction to 3D modelling, way back in 1999, was ray-tracing with the classic freeware Persistence of Vision (POV-Ray) package. The whole point of POV-Ray was (and is) to program a virtual 3D scene that can be rendered into still images very slowly, but in amazing detail, using ray-tracing algorithms. It was never about producing models for 3D printing or other computer-assisted manufacture techniques. But what was cool about POV-Ray was that, at least in its native implementation, there was no GUI or WYSIWYG interface. To make POV-Ray models, you used a text editor to program objects using so-called "constructive solid geometry" (CSG) techniques, in which complex forms were built up as unions, differences, and/or intersections of "primitive" shapes like cubes, circles, and prisms. It was all done in a special programming language native to the POV-Ray environment. To see what you'd made, you had to render the file.

Almost a decade later, when I started messing around with modern 3D modelling software for the purpose of rapid prototyping, I was disappointed to discover that my POV-Ray CSG skills did not port. Everything was resource-hungry interactive WYSIWYG interfacing, which definitely has its advantages, but also typically has a pretty steep learning curve as you learn just to move around the virtual 3D space of the modelling environment. It can be difficult to select exactly the point you want, to snap exactly to the distance you intend, and so forth. For a couple of personal projects, I manage to kludge together some tools that would let me design objects in POV-Ray and then convert them to STL files, but it was always an unreliable and wonky process.

So I was really stoked this morning to read this post over on the Thingiverse Blog about the advent of OpenSCAD, which does for 3D CAD what POV-Ray did for raytracing. At long last, you can program your 3D CAD models instead of sculpting them. And it's free! I can hardly wait to try it out.

Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Nov 25, 2009 09:00 AM
3D printing, Computers, Toolbox | Permalink | Comments (3) | Suggest a Site

Make: Holiday Gift Guide 2009: Blinky Blinky

What's better for a holiday gift then LEDs? More LEDs! Trick out your festivities with these blinky kits!

MiniPOV Kit ($18)
The canonical LED project, this persistence of vision (POV) kit spells out a message when you shake it. Perfect for someone learning to solder, the kit includes everything you need to build and display your own messages on a screen that you have to shake to see.

Peggy 2 LED Display Kit ($100, LEDs extra)
An updated version of the original Peggy, this board should provide all of the LED action that one can handle. Solder up to 625 LEDs into the circuit board, program in some animations, and you've got a re-usable holiday decoration or radiant gift!

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ArduiNIX demo looks pretty darn cool

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Some Nixie tube eye candy courtesy of the ArduiNIX shield. More on its usage with Arduino over at Flock of Butterflies.

USB pet rock

Wish I'd thought of this gag first. The USB pet rock from ThinkGeek has all the functionality of the original pet rock, but is USB compatible.

USB sofa - never lose your flash drive again

For those bored by the portability of thumb drives, a 14GB furniture set designed to encourage data sharing -

The sofas were made by creative design studio Cabracega for last year's International Festival for the Post-Digital Creation Culture (OFFF). As you can see (you'll have to squint a little) the sofas have USB cables coming out of them. The 4 sofas store a total of 14GB of files which doesn't seem like a lot, but I'm pretty sure no other storage device can accommodate up to 4 people

Sure beats a built-in magazine rack! (unless of course you're laptop-less): [via Geekologie]

Self-righting autonomous swarming robots

As if autonomous swarming robots weren't cool enough. SensorFly, a prototype from the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, shows just how robust the current crop really is. Knock down one of these sensor-packed hovering whirlygigs and it reorients itself to take flight again in a matter of seconds. [via BotJunkie]

The SensorFly is a novel low-cost controlled-mobile aerial sensor networking platform. A flock of these 29g autonomous helicopter nodes with communication, ranging and collaborative path determination capabilities, can be extremely useful in sensing survivors after disasters or adversaries in urban combat scenarios.

XBee Wireless Temperature Sensor

This wireless temperature sensor project uses an XBee, breakout board, and simple power supply to transmit temperature data to an Arduino base station. This looks like it could be easily expanded into a whole house monitoring system. [via Arduino.cc]

I decided to explore the more advanced features of XBee radios by building a remote temperature sensor. You can get quite a bit of control over an XBee radio without a microcontroller at all. You can configure the radio to send sensor readings at particular intervals when it detects changes on certain input pins.

New in the Maker Shed: Dangerous Book for Boys Electronics

The Dangerous Book for Boys Essential Electronics kit presents electronics every kid should know through fun, engaging, and impressive experiments and activities. Read a brief history of the research and discoveries associated with electricity and electronics. A full-color, 32-page, manual guides you through 30 hands-on experiments. Don't let the name fool you, It's a great kit for boys and girls!

How the H1N1 vaccine is made

Plus Misc Images Eggs-Vaccine
How the H1N1 vaccine is made... That looks like a pick and place egg machine...

The most striking feature of the H1N1 flu vaccine manufacturing process is the 1,200,000,000 chicken eggs required to make the 3 billion doses of vaccine that may be required worldwide. There are entire chicken farms in the US and around the world dedicated to producing eggs for the purpose of incubating influenza viruses for use in vaccines. No wonder it takes six months from start to finish. But we'll get to that in a minute.

Homebrew solar light

To give his pepper plants some extra light during the winter months, João Silva decided to set up a solar-powered light that would charge during the day, then light a lamp after dark. Rather than simply scavenging a circuit from an old garden lamp, though, he designed his own SolarLamp circuit from scratch. It looks like a fun project, and he has a good explanation of the issues that he ran into when designing a circuit to work at low voltages. As a bonus, he used the open source circuit toolkit gEDA/SPICE/ngspice to design and simulate the circuit. Excellent work!

Improved solar charger

Rural celly charger

HOW TO - Make a home-made sun jar

EmbeddedSPARK 2010 Challenge

Microsoft is running another contest for 2010 centered on embedded systems and their embeddedSPARK platform, the Windows embedded software for hobbyists. The grand prize this year is a $15,000. The theme is "Fun & Games." See the embeddedSPARK website for all of the contest details.

embeddedSPARK 2010 Challenge

A breadboard for your groaning board

The folks at Sparkle Labs have put up a cute project on their site. It's a simple LED circuit on a breadboard (built with their Discover Electronics Kit), with some Turkey papercraft attached, to create a Thanksgiving table decoration. This is a great way to get your kids involved in a basic electronics project that becomes part of the holiday festivities (er... for those of you in the States).

Thanksgiving LED Turkey centerpiece project

Jonathan Wolfe's puzzle acorns

My buddy Jon makes these awesome little puzzle boxes from acorns. There are four shown in the video: one pair consisting of a smaller hinged acorn that nests, matryoshka-style, inside a larger one with a wire spring latch; a larger, locking nut that is opened by removing a small pin; and, finally, a large hinged version that is unlatched by knocking it against a surface from a certain angle. Besides this post, the project doesn't have any web presence to speak of, but Jon says its fine to e-mail him directly if you are interested in more information.

Make: Holiday Gift Guide 2009: DIY photography

Know someone that is interested in photography? Or a tinkerer who wants to present their work in a better light? Then we have a guide for you! Here are some project and gear recommendations to help you find the perfect present.

Make them a photo with DIY bokeh effects (Free, if you have the equipment)
Use your leet photography skillz to make a photo that you can give as a gift, with a bokeh filter made from a piece of cardstock.

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Dance of the Christmas Robots

It's still way too early for holiday music and decorations, however this was too good to pass up. Robobuilder made this RoboBuilder Xmas Dance Routine to demonstrate the capabilities of their 5720t 'Huno' robotics kit. Ok, I'll take ten. [via neatorama]

SPARK Project #3, Post #2

Blinking an LED and transmitting text to a serial terminal is not the most exciting thing in the world, but it's very cool to breathe life into a balky computer, even at the most basic level. Also, I have worked with enough development tools to know that it can be a lot of work going from the first build to basic function. Many vendors, like National Instruments, Texas Instruments, and others, have recognized the value of making a good first impression, while preserving all the power and sophistication available to the user. I do understand that ease of use can be hard to achieve, especially with complex, powerful tools. I own a small Sherline CNC mill that I built up with 3-phase brushless motors, a custom motor controller, and optical limit switches. It was a fun project, especially building the machine and seeing it run for the first time. I use it much less frequently than I would like, but it's been very handy for many of my projects. The mill is powerful enough for small projects, and simple enough that I can ignore it for several months without forgetting how to use it. I also have a little experience running large industrial CNC mills. I could make a lot of cool devices if I had a 5-axis commercial CNC machine, but using the machine effectively would require a substantial and continuous investment of time. Given what can go wrong, improper operation resulting from infrequent practice can be disastrous.

I've experienced a similar comparison between Windows Embedded CE and other prototyping and development tools I've worked with. For simple embedded projects, I use a wide variety of tools, from Arduino to ARM and others. I like to program in C or C++, using assembly only when I have to. I have been known to slip uLinux into projects when I can. These systems are like the Sherline CNC mill. They have limitations, yet are valuable from an ease-of-use perspective. Windows Embedded CE is more like the large industrial CNC mill - very powerful once time has been invested.

Now about those XBees, check out the Microsoft SPARK site for more!

Sparkfun's free day January 7th

Sparkfun is giving away things for free on January 7!

You can blame it on Chris Anderson's book Free. After reading his book, I started kicking around the idea of what we can do that's 'free'. Sure, we have free bits (open-source hardware designs, available code, etc.), but we don't have free physical widgets. Now combine that with our love of creating shear havoc (AVC, C&D letter, Portable Rotary Phone), and you get Free Day.
Nobody gives away a free physical thing. There's always a catch. So up front: you have to pay shipping. Other than that, it's open season.

$100 max per household

You pay shipping

Limit of $100,000 in giveaways for the day

Starts 9AM MST January 7th, 2010

Ends 11PM MST January 7th, 2010 (or when we hit $100k, whichever comes first)

Rainchecks for popular items will be allowed

DIY capacitive pressure sensor tile

I am a sucker for a good SketchUp exploded view (although I think the screws shown in this one just have to be wrong). This plan comes from the usbddr project. From the readme file:

usbddr is firmware for the Atmel ATMega8 which implements a usb controller ("dance pad") for games such as stepmania. In contrast to other homebrew dance pads, it uses capacitive sensing, eliminating mechanical wear and allowing adjustable sensitivity.

There's some good discussion of the project over at Hack a Day,

Paxtruder

Charles Pax is working on a new MakerBot extruder he's aptly calling the Paxtruder. It makes it super easy to change out the plastic filament, and can even be butted up against another one of itself for potential support material extrusion one day. Check out the plans on Thingiverse.

Make: Gift Guide 2009: Gifts that will inspire your kids

The holiday season is a great time of year, especially for kids! This year I came up with a list of products that will inspire your children, and let you in on the fun too! Many of these recommendations were inspired by my own childhood. I certainly made a lot of kits growing up, and I've included a few of my favorites in this list! Remember, the holiday season is a great time to start a new project with your kids. Teach them something new, get involved....and don't forget to have some fun!

Haba architectural blocks (OOMPA, $16.49 - $89.99)
I was lucky enough as a kid to have a really cool set of blocks that were made by my grandfather. We made houses, mazes for our little rodent friends, racetracks, and just about anything else you could imagine. Most blocks today are standard squares and rectangles, maybe an arch or two. Haba blocks are the exception. They make an incredible variety of blocks, including Baroque Building Blocks, the Coliseum, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Castle parts, and a lot more. Be sure to click through all the pages to see the complete line of Haba architectural building blocks.

Drawdio Kit (Maker Shed, $19.50)
Drawdio is a really fun DIY electronics kit and musical instrument. It's easy to assemble, and fun to hack! Drawdio has been kid-tested at my house for many hours, and is a hit with everyone who tries it! The kit requires some soldering, but you could make that into a great learning experience for your little engineer in training.

Drawdio is an electronic pencil that lets you make music while you draw! It's a great project for beginners: An easy kit with instant gratification! Essentially, its a very simple musical synthesizer that uses the conductive properties of pencil graphite to create different sounds. The result is a fun toy that lets you draw musical instruments on any piece of paper.

Telescope (Orion, $49.95 - $300+)
I have to admit, I never owned a telescope, but that may change soon. Recently, I've been researching telescopes, both DIY and commercial versions. I plan on getting a truss tube Dobsonian scope one day, but they're fairly expensive, so I might have to wait a while longer, or try to make a DIY version. Orion seems to have a nice selection of beginner scopes, at reasonable prices. However, do your research before making any large investment.

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