The latest blog posts.

  • The Earth-Moon Orrery: a quick status update.

    The Earth-Moon Orrery: a quick status update.

    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… Read more

  • Building a 3D Graphics Pipeline on an Arduino, Part 5

    Building a 3D Graphics Pipeline on an Arduino, Part 5

    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… Read more

  • Building a 3D Graphics Pipeline on an Arduino, Part 4

    Building a 3D Graphics Pipeline on an Arduino, Part 4

    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… Read more

  • Building a 3D Graphics Pipeline on an Arduino, Part 3

    Building a 3D Graphics Pipeline on an Arduino, Part 3

    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… Read more

  • Building a 3D Graphics Pipeline on an Arduino, Part 2

    Building a 3D Graphics Pipeline on an Arduino, Part 2

    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… Read more

  • Building a 3D Graphics Pipeline on an Arduino, Part 1

    Building a 3D Graphics Pipeline on an Arduino, Part 1

    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… Read more

  • The test print of the Earth-Moon Orrery

    The test print of the Earth-Moon Orrery

    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… Read more

  • Designing a simple Earth-Moon Orrery.

    Designing a simple Earth-Moon Orrery.

    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… Read more

  • Testing 3D Printing of Gears

    Testing 3D Printing of Gears

    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… Read more

  • Calibrating The Printer.

    Calibrating The Printer.

    If you’ve ever tried to print something with precision dimensions on a 3D printer, you notice things aren’t exactly the dimensions asked. Sometimes it happens because the printer is miscalibrated, but often, it’s due to the technology. Take, for example, the Form 2 Printer by FormLabs. This fantastic 3D printer uses stereolithography to print parts,… Read more

  • And so it begins.

    And so it begins.

    It’s been my desire for a while now to somehow give back to the community, to teach people how to write code and how to create things, and how to take joy in designing new things and bringing them into existence. And so it begins. The intent of this blog and web site is for… Read more