Tag: openjscad

Fun Things Lately

I don’t know when I’ll have time to do a proper update, so here’s a list-dump of geeky stuff I’ve been up to lately:

  • I started playing Cities: Skylines two days ago.  My brain is processing all kinds of patterns around roadways and pedestrian paths and stuff like that. 
    • imageimage
    • Left was my 6th or so city.. Right is my 8th or so city.  I keep trying to get things “perfect”. 
    • I made a chart of “Noise Polluting” vs “Ground Polluting”, and another chart of “Who wants to be near whom”. 
    • My best idea so far is a big Triangle with Commercial, Industry, and Residential at each corner.
  • My 3D printer broke, and then resurrected itself – there’s a loose power wire going to the extruder.  Its jiggered so that it works for now.
  • I volunteered to make a unique 3D print for a fundraiser basket.  I started off in blender, ended up doing it mostly in OpenJSCAD.  Here are the draft (left) and almost-final-but-slight-oops (right):
  • At work, not much is new.    Still working in an fairly simple MVC app, which deals with gathering user input, filling out PDF’s, and submitting information to various external services.
    • A little bit of PDF parsing and modification that I’d never done before.
    • A little bit of image-detection using some System.Drawing libraries (to detect if what the user uploaded was a valid image)
    • Mostly churning through smaller tasks in preparation for a release.
    • A lot of dealing with configuration migration problems.   Finding a way to export and import configurations between environments so that changes only need to be hand-typed once, and then can be copied from environment to environment. 
    • Next week I get to start investigating 3 services I’ve never talked to before.  Exciting!

Using OpenJSCAD to print a house (2/N): Small Print!

I advanced the code significantly:

https://github.com/sunnywiz/housejscad/releases/tag/Post2

  • I introduced a “TwoD” class to take the pain out of working in the 2-D character space.
  • I traced out my house’s 4th floor plan to a text file, so I’m dealing with the real thing now rather than test data.
  • I got my 3D printer back up and running – didn’t need any re-calibration after 6 months of no-use.  I had to go read the powerpoint of the presentation I gave a while back to re-remember what to do.
  • The result is this print, which is 1:72 scale, and took about 4 hours (1 failed print included):  

image

Its in two pieces so that:

  • I don’t have to print support structures for the doorways and windows
  • We see things at eye-level, or about 5.5 feet; the model is 8 feet; this makes the model feel overly tall.  With a removable section a little lower, this becomes more “playable”. (I need to move the cut line up though to be at about 5 feet.  Or, move the windows down a bit)

I’ll do a full “How To” video at some point in the future – I’m not quite done yet.  There’s some bleeding edge stuff in the “cuts” branch at the moment:

  • I’ve learned how to do real drag-and-drop libraries, in a separate file, which will work with OpenJSCAD
  • I’m working on a cutting algorithm that will let me cut with tabs.  Its workable now, but needs some fine tuning on gap distances.
  • We’ve (wife and I) decided to do the final print in 1:48 scale – there’s a lot of toy furniture out there available at that scale.  And it will be printed in white.

More to follow at some point.

Using OpenJSCAD to Print a House (1/N)

Since before I got my 3D printer, I’ve wanted to make a scale replica of my house.   I tried doing it with Legos once – it was cost prohibitive.

I came up with a workflow where I drew out the entire house in SweetHome3D, and then exported that, but I ran into manifold problems and stuff like that.

So I did one of the floors in Sketchup.  However, that was a painfully task – and the resulting model was still too big (I want 1:24 or 1:36 scale).  I’d have to slice up the model to print out individual pieces, which means I wanted to cut them in such a way that they joined together with some kind of self-aligning joint.

I was about to try it again, but the sheer amount of detail that I had to go through kept holding me back.  I wanted a formula.

A recent blog post brought my attention to OpenJSCAD. and an Idea formed in my head:

Convert THIS: image
Into THIS: image

I had tried to do something similar in OpenSCAD before, however, because that language doesn’t have procedural elements, I ran into all kinds of problems.   Fresh new start!

So I set about to do it.

As you can see by this screenshot, I succeeded.

The code is here: https://github.com/sunnywiz/housejscad.  It took me about 2 hours.   You can see the commit log, I committed every time I figured even a small piece of the puzzle out.

UPDATE 2/1/2015:  the code as of this blog post is tagged with “Post1”, ie https://github.com/sunnywiz/housejscad/releases/tag/Post1  — the code has since evolved. Another blog post is in the works.  I guess I could “release to main” every time I do a blog post.  Heh.

The Code

  • Provide a translation of map character to 1x1x10 primitive anchored at 0,0,0
  • convert the template into a 2D Array, so that I can look for chunks of repeated stuff.
  • Walk the pattern, looking for chunks.  Rather than get fancy, I made a list of all chunk sizes from 6×6 down to 2×1, and check for each one at a time.
    • There are more efficient ways to do this, but IAGNI.
  • If a chunk is found, generate the primitive for that chunk, scale it up, and add it to the list.  “Consume” the characters which we just generated.
  • When all done, union everything together.

Notes about the Code

  • The resulting file is not manifold, however, NetFabb fixes that pretty easily and reliably.
  • The chunking is necessary if I want to represent steps in an area.    Otherwise, I didn’t need it.
  • You can define any mapping you want .. from a character to a function that returns a CSG.
  • Could probably use this to generate dungeon levels pretty easily.  Or, maybe take a game of NetHack and generate out the level?  Coolness!

Where would it go from here

  • Lay out an actual template of (part of) the house, and fine tune it from there.
    • Probably involve adding “and I want the result to be exactly 150 by 145mm” type scaling.
    • The functions will probably start taking arguments like (dx,dy) => so that the function can draw something intelligent for an area that is dx by dy in size.
    • I just noticed, the output is mirrored due to axes being different between R,C and Y,X
  • Preferably, I’d like to create a object / class that does this work, rather than the current style of coding.  IAGNI at the moment.  Then, maybe running in node, I could take the different floors and convert then into objects, and then do further manipulation on them..
    • Like slice them into top and bottom pieces.  Windows and doors print a lot better upside down – no support material necessary.
    • Would also need to slice them into horizontal pieces.  My build platform is limited to 6” square.
  • I live in a very 90-degree-angle house.   Thus, this kind of solution would work for me.  Sorry if you live in a circular, or slightly angled, house, this solution is not for you.    Buy me a house, and I’ll build you a solutiion. 😛
    • Seriously thinking about this.  I’d probably have a template of “points”, and then a language of “Draw a wall from A to D to E”;  and then “place a door on wall from A to D at the intersection of F”  or something like that.

A fun night of short and sweet coding.  I had to look up a lot of javascript primitives, mostly around arrays of arrays, and checking for undefined.

Some day I’ll get that “doll” house printed.  Then I can make scale sizes of all my furniture from Lego’s!  Fun fun.