A place to learn about coding, making things, and stuff that strikes my fancy.
I have always wanted to write a series of articles on user interface design from the ground up, but I've never seem to have the time. Well, it's time to take the time, and now that I have this beautiful little 2.8" TFT Touch Shield that thus far I've been using to show how to... Continue Reading →
My ultimate goal is to recreate the 3D printed object in brass, creating a small little tabletop Orrery for display. That means, of course, cutting gears. So there has been a little bit of a pause while I order the correct things for gear cutting. Ultimately my goal is to set up a Sherline mill... Continue Reading →
One of the advantages of our design is that we can rapidly port our 3D drawing code to another platform. In fact, we could port our code off the Arduino entirely and move it to a different microprocessor or even to your desktop computer. All we have to do is to alter how we initialize... Continue Reading →
We have all the pieces. Let's put them together, shall we? With the last article we had a clipping algorithm which could clip lines so that only the visible lines are displayed. Now let's put the whole thing together. Some Math in Code. On our second article we introduced the concept of Homogeneous Coordinates. This... Continue Reading →
Now let's talk clipping: the process of making sure we don't write a line that's not visible on the screen. We're so used to having clipping done for us that sometimes we can forget that clipping is not something that "just happens." When we write a line to the screen what we're really doing, at... Continue Reading →
Let's talk coordinate systems. Yes, I understand that this will involve that most dreaded of four letter words, math. I promise I'll be gentle, and I'll try my best to make this as easy to follow as possible. Some of this may be a little basic; feel free to skip ahead if you already know... Continue Reading →
This is a series of articles I've intended to write showing the creation of a basic 3D graphics pipeline on an Arduino. By the end of this series hopefully you'll have a good understanding of basic 3D graphics, including coordinate transformations, rendering and perspective rendering. Things you need to follow along. Of course, if you... Continue Reading →
So after a couple of days of printing, and a little sanding, some assembly, and not a tiny bit of cursing, I have a printed orrery gear assembly for our Earth-Moon Orrery. It's a little stiff, but that's to be expected since I haven't perfected the gears through sanding. (That means carefully going through each... Continue Reading →
My eventual goal: to build a simple a simple Tellurion, an Orrery which shows the relative position of the moon around the earth as the earth revolves around the sun. This will be a series of blog posts, documenting the good, the bad and the ugly. For me the first step is to fire up... Continue Reading →
Kythera is a product sold by Glenview Software for $10 which allows you to string together complex mechanisms using spur gears. It helps you design complex mechanisms quickly on your computer and export .STL files for printing on a 3D printer. And today we'll use it to build a test mechanism, in order to test... Continue Reading →
