GuruBlog

Bathroom-real-estate is a very limited resource in our flat, so I designed a brush-holder that can be glued to the wall and printed it on my makerbot.

I really like how a 3D-printer helps from getting "would be nice if .." into "cool - lets try it"

you can download the brushholder openscad source or the exported brushholder stl

I made a short animation in processing that renders some spheres and then inverts the frame.

Click here to run the applet or download the source

the Toxiclibs are a very interesting collection of processing libraries. One of the libraries is called volumeutils and allows to use a volumetric space to model a 3D object.

I used it to generate a tentacle and export it as a stl file to make it printable on my 3D-printer.

click here to see it live or download the source-code

In the setup method i define a volumetric space containing 100x100x100 voxel, a iso surface and a Triangle mesh (which is needed to display the object and export it later)

gfx = new ToxiclibsSupport(this);
VolumetricSpace volume = new VolumetricSpaceArray( new Vec3D(100,200,100), 100, 100, 100 );
IsoSurface surface = new ArrayIsoSurface( volume );
mesh = new TriangleMesh();

Have you ever lost a button? One that is unique and cannot be found anywere? Do you want to sew something special and need very special buttons?

And do you own a 3D-Printer?

Then there is a solution to your problems - The Parametric-Button-Generator!

Download the openscad file, adjust the parameters and print your buttons

I designed a heart-shaped cookie cutter unsing my cookie cutter editor - right in time for Valentine :-)

click here to download the stl file or download the sourcefile for the cookie cutter editor

I made a lightning bolt to test the openscad polygon and linear_extrude functions.
To define a polygon you have to define a set of 2D-coordinates and some sets that define the paths. In this example only one path is defined that connects all the points. Then I extruded the polygon to make it 3D and centered it using translate, to make it printable.

translate(v=[0,-45,1]) {
    linear_extrude( height=2, center=true)
    polygon( points = [[-5,0], [15,40], [5, 55], [20, 75], [0, 90], [-15, 55 ], [2, 36]],
        paths=[[0,1,2,3,4,5,6]]
    );
}

you can download the openscad source or the stl file

This is a small weaving shuttle I desinged for my mom. It's printed on my makerbot using black ABS.

Download the openscad source or the stl file if you want to print your own.

Another simple 3D-Processing-Sketch, this time a surface generated by rotating a square function. I think I will try to print this on my makerbot this weekend.

Click here to see it in action or download the source

This is a little processing sketch featuring a sphere. By moving the mouse it dissolves into a spiral

click here to try it and download the source

Yesterday I got a Kinect and it worked out of the box with the freenect libs on my linux box and my mac. But the processing-wrappers from daniel shiffman only worked on the mac. Since my linux box has a bit more power than my mac-mini, I started to fiddle around a bit with the source code and - TATAAAA - it run's on my ubuntu box.

To make it run check out the git-repository for libkinect by using 'git clone'

git clone git://github.com/shiffman/libfreenect.git

Then build the library using cmake like it's described in the readme

then change to the wrapper/java directory. There you find a small shellscript that compiles the jni- and processing-wrappers. I had to add some include-paths to make the c-compiler find my jni.h and I changed the target system to 32-Bit (by removing the -m64 flag).

On my ubuntu box using the sun jdk the jni.h include-path is this.

-I/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.22/include -I/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.22/include/linux

Then make sure the LIBFREENET_LIBRARY path points to the libfreenect.a file you compiled earlier. If you use a build directory like It's recommendet in the Readme file than don't forget to add it to the path (this took me some time :-/ )

after running the build script install the 'openkinect.zip' from the processing/distribution folder to your sketchbook/library folder and add the libOpenKinect.so file from the dist directory to sketchbook/libraries/openkinect/library

and than make a symlink from 'libOpenKinect.so' to 'libKinect.so'

ln -s libOpenKinect.so libKinect.so