I thought I would teach myself some OpenGL during this holiday week. For the uninitiated, OpenGL is the common core 3D rendering that all recent video cards support. Unless you’re doing game development or scientific visualizations, you typically don’t need to mess with it. (And even game developers frequently use higher-level tools to hide the picky … Continue reading Experiments in OpenGL
Tag: openscad
The design and manufacture of a cat toy
Yesterday I taked about fixing a cat toy. Today, I should briefly mention the one I designed a couple of weekends ago. I’ve had the idea kicking around in my head for quite a few months to design a treat-dispensing cat toy. Surprisingly, there is not one already on Thingiverse. I sketched out a quick … Continue reading The design and manufacture of a cat toy
Designing & manufacturing a shower caddy
Many modern shampoo bottles have a flat top that allows you to set it down top-side-down. Unfortunately, the brand of all-natural crunchy-granola urban-hippy shampoo that I use does not have such a top. I either cannot get to the last little bit of shampoo or I have to do something creative with the bottle: balance … Continue reading Designing & manufacturing a shower caddy
From Atoms to Bits to Atoms: A Cat Toy’s Journey
After staring at a cat toy for a few minutes, piecing out the geometry, I realized that this would make a great instructional design for an introduction to 3D CAD modeling using simple geometric shapes and boolean transforms.
The little bowl I designed & printed
UPDATE: I printed this at Shapeways in food-safe glazed ceramic. See the progression from code to object in a more recent blog post. I made a thing! Well, I designed and made a thing. You will find my “finger cup” at Thingiverse. Quick background: several times a day at work, I find myself in the … Continue reading The little bowl I designed & printed
Parametric Measuring Spoons
I recently developed some measuring spoon models. The math and basic design were, surprisingly, the easy part. Attempting to realize an idealistic design within the constraints of the real-world was a bit more difficult and ended up being the majority of the work. The design itself is fairly simple. Maybe you remember the volume of … Continue reading Parametric Measuring Spoons