Freesteel Blog » Barmesh slicer freeform subdivision

Barmesh slicer freeform subdivision

Sunday, December 7th, 2014 at 4:14 pm Written by:

I’m going to do some other coding, now that I got this result. The code would fall apart if I touched it again.
impslicesubdiv

Next on the list of things to do is clear out the vast quantity of rubbish left in the code, completely redo the subdivision loops and make the logic robust, apply it to multiple z-levels and plot slices, then make it test against edges and faces (not just points), and package it into a self-contained (but very slow) version of the slicer.

I don’t know how long this will take, as there are many other distractions available.

In particular I should be doing some coding on the electionleaflets site to enable marking up of leaflets after uploading. I’m in my sister’s house in Cambridge right now, not answering the door to political canvassers from two different parties in the last two days. The election campaign is already in full swing, whether we know it or not.

When I’m in Cambridge I always remember a bizarre encounter I had with a young Ukrainian bloke at the Cambridge Makespace one evening last October. No one was paying attention to him, so I gave him an earful about Housahedron which I’d been working on for a while, and he told me about some of his work making Petcube (among other things), pointing out that though he could fund this product from his own money, doing it via kickstarter gave you the much-more-valuable product marketing as a side-effect.

Apparently, he’s doing well for himself, as you can see from this video:

This is what curious people do — get out of the hotel and not be physically and psychologically trapped by their status and turn up in interesting places and meet people who have no idea who they are. Shame he’s not working on some energy efficiency technology that we desperately need, rather than creating an iPhone version of a restaurant. But this was the precise conversation where I got the idea for why kickstarter is the right thing to do for this triangular machine tool that will one day eventually turn up in the hack space.

Then, because I still didn’t want to work, I went surfing through the website of the week on the ThisIsHell archives, which turned up NASA Watch, where they decried the boondoggle of the Mars mission, took a swipe at cubesats (which is something I heard about at the last Liverpool Internet of Things meetup), and then stumbled onto a post about OpenROV:

[Stackpole] had, under his arm, what might appear to be a clunky toy blue submarine about the size of a lunchbox. The machine is the latest prototype of the OpenROV — an open-source, remotely operated vehicle that could map the cave in 3D using software from Autodesk

Firstly, everything is connected.

And secondly, Autodesk doesn’t have any frigging 3D cave mapping software. Everyone’s too busy stuck in their ruts with their highly profitable suite of creaky old products and a congealed strata of middle management who don’t want to be told that software engineering practices might have probably moved on a bit since the 1980s.

There is no tone in which they can inform them of this matter that won’t result in them either (a) ignoring the message because it’s told too politely and therefore easy to ignore, or (b) ignoring it because you are being inappropriately obnoxious to someone who is more senior and of higher status than you.

Meanwhile the OpenROV is a kit you can buy for $899. I want someone to get one for Christmas, so I can borrow it and launch it off my canoe, either in the sea or in that Altaussee lake from which divers reported in 1989:

After several days of searching in freezing water of up to 42m depth the resurgence was found. Unfortunately it consisted of hundreds of tiny blow-holes covering an area of thirty square metres and so was totally impenetrable. [It consisted] of thousands of tiny springs flowing up through mud and was hence totally impenetrable.

Having dived underwater in an Austrian lake (it’s like the bottom of a water barrel with layers of cold rotting leaves), I don’t believe anyone could have witnessed such a remarkable sight.

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