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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.

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]

November 24, 2009

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!

November 20, 2009

PYMT, a multi-touch library for Python

Interested in building programs with fancy multi-touch interfaces? Speak Python? Well, in that case you might want to have a look at PYMT. Designed for rapid interface design, it looks like it would be fun to play around with. [via the space station]

November 17, 2009

SPARK Project #3, Post #1

For my third and final SPARK project, I'm going to continue building on lessons learned from Project 1 and Project 2. I've found Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 to be a powerful tool, but getting started is not a trivial process. Despite a sophisticated IDE, configuring and building running systems can be challenging, especially when the hardware isn't working as expected. So I'm going to continue where I left off with Project 2, and create the building blocks to control external devices using a serial interface.

A number of my projects have required wireless communications. I've tried many wireless systems, and one of my favorites is the XBee transceiver from Digi. They are easy to configure and use, and there is a wealth of example code to drive them from a wide variety of computing platforms. The high-power version can transmit over long distances, and at 250kbps, the data rate is excellent. I frequently use the devices as a simple wireless serial link, although they are very effective for point-to-multipoint and multipoint-to-point communications.

Follow my exploration of Windows Embedded CE driving xBees on the Microsoft SPARK site!

November 15, 2009

Build: Chumby Guts kit

When I put together my Chumby Guts kit, I had to stop and scratch my head a few times because I didn't know how to orient a part or which screws to use. I filmed the second time around, to share with you how easy it comes together! Now all that's left is to build a plush enclosure for it. Keep an eye out for an upcoming CRAFT Video about that!

Subscribe to the MAKE podcast in iTunes, or download the m4v video.

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Chumby Guts

November 12, 2009

Real imitates virtual - Windows/Mac calculators

Korean product design firm MintPass came up with these great concept designs for real calculators that imitate their software counterparts. [via Boing Boing]

November 8, 2009

Lisp Manga...

Pt 2272
Firs it was "The Manga Guide to Statistics" then it was "The Manga Guide to Electricity" ...and now, Lisp Manga.

Lisp (or LISP) is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized syntax. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older.

November 5, 2009

Nonexistent town in Google maps

Interesting article in the Telegraph about "Argleton," a town that appears in Google maps but does not, apparently, exist in the real world. The best theory I've heard is that the town is a "trap" intended to catch those who steal map data. [Thanks, Glen!]

November 2, 2009

$40K DARPA "find the balloons" social networking challenge

Starting on December 5, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will award $40,000 to the first registered team to correctly report the location of ten eight-foot-diameter red weather balloons distributed randomly across the continental United States. From the challenge website:

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

Personally, I think 99 red balloons would've been better, for marketing purposes, than 10. I guess that would take way too long. [via Hack a Day]

October 22, 2009

Automatic image index-maker software

matt_mets_things_in_my_kitchen (Custom).jpg

Our own Matt Mets put me onto this program called Montage from the open-source ImageMagick suite. Shown above is Matt's image "Things in my kitchen," and here is the command line to Montage that produced it:

montage +frame +shadow +label -tile 10x8 -borderwidth 1 -background white -bordercolor white -geometry 200x133 *.jpg stuff.jpg

As you can see, Montage takes all the work out of combining a bunch of individual images into an array of images, dealing automatically with all the resizing, cropping, arranging, and/or labeling headaches automatically.

Below is my own experiment with the software, "A visual guide to necklines," which I made because I never have any idea how to describe women's clothes.

Montage arrayed the images, added drop shadows, and labeled them based on their file names automatically. The only real work involved was tracking down the images online and saving them as appropriately-named files, but it wouldn't be hard to write a script to do that, either. Then one could conceivably go from a typed list of nouns to a complete visual index of those nouns completely automatically.

October 21, 2009

Translating a digital volume into a physical volume

I love these physical expressions of digital data. Here, a computer trashcan filling up is reflected in an inflating balloon. Empty the trash, and the balloon deflates. Lots of other nice physical computing examples on this page.

Tangible Prototypes Lab

October 19, 2009

Train an army of children to recycle bottles for you

There's an odd synchronicity here with last week's post about the coin-scavenging-crow training machine. This time it's a whack-a-mole style video game that you play by dropping glass bottles into the slots when they light up. See it work around 0:40.

In a side note, Volkswagen's Fun Theory Award is now definitely on my radar. Besides this project, their competition to incentivize socially-useful behaviors by turning them into entertainment also produced the world's deepest rubbish bin and the subway staircase piano keyboard. [via Hack a Day]

Netbook tablet mod

Netbook hacker Rob928 created this excellent tablet mod by tearing apart his Dell Vostro A90 netbook, adding a Hoda Technology solderless touchscreen kit, and filling in the gaps with plastic epoxy. [via slashgear]

October 18, 2009

'Magnetic electricity' discovered

46550389 Spinice0562
'Magnetic electricity' discovered...

Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity: single magnetic charges that can behave and interact like electrical ones. The work is the first to make use of the magnetic monopoles that exist in special crystals known as spin ice. Writing in Nature journal, a team showed that monopoles gather to form a "magnetic current" like electricity. The phenomenon, dubbed "magnetricity", could be used in magnetic storage or in computing.

October 15, 2009

Using sonar to save power

Here's a neat idea: using the standard microphone and speakers that are built into most recent laptops, researchers from Northwestern and University of Michigan have developed a sonar system to detect when a user is near the computer. Why is this interesting? Well, the idea is that it can be used to turn your computer screen off as soon as you walk away, rather than waiting the typical 10 or 20 minutes for the screensaver to kick on. It's a pretty neat idea, especially since it doesn't require any extra components, however I wonder how much power the sonar system itself will draw.

[via slashdot]

October 14, 2009

SPARK Project #2, Post #5

Small and simple, the iCOP eBox is a fanless x86 computer with solid state storage.

I began my second SPARK project with plans to control my iRobot Create with an iCOP computer and Windows Embedded CE 6.0R2. There were many project design lessons reinforced by my first SPARK project, and I applied those to lessons my second SPARK project. Even though I was working with powerful tools, Windows Embedded CE and the SPARK kits are complex systems. It is important to start with very simple expectations, get the basic components to function, and then design in complex features. With this focus on simplicity, I set about writing Windows Embedded code for the Create. After tracking down the necessary documentation for the Create's programming interface, I started with a simple "Hello World" program, and documented the process here. My next step involved sending and receiving data over the iCOP computer's serial port. Very quickly, I found myself editing registry code to enable the serial port for application use. Why did I need to do that and what were the results? The answers to those questions require a discussion of several intermediate steps which bring clarity to the structure and design of a Windows Embedded CE application.

Read more about it in the full post here.

October 13, 2009

Homebrew CNC hot wire foam cutter

I keep trying to persuade anyone who will listen that CNC foam cutters are dramatically underrated machines. People look at them and say, "That's cool and all, but I don't want styrofoam parts." To which I reply, "If you have a styrofoam part, you can turn it into cast aluminum with an unbelievably simple garage process." What's more, styrofoam is ubiquitous, cheap, and so easy to cut that the Cartesian robot can be extremely lightweight and inexpensive, as for instance, this one submitted by reader Raul Aguaviva, which is hacked together from a coat hanger and junked scanner parts. Combine one of these with a Gingery-style charcoal foundry and you could conceivably produce a homebrew rapid prototyping system, capable of "printing" aluminum parts, for less than $50.

October 9, 2009

Software "auralization"

Finnish computer science doctoral candidate Cessu created a hack to make music from (dramatically slowed) bit-level operations in his CPU. A similar technique called "software visualization" is more commonly used to clarify the operation of complex algorithms for educational and analytical purposes, but Cessu seems to be the first person to try it with sound. [via Hack a Day]

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