Escher "Cubic Space"

It's always good to use the right tools. Someone was asking on the POV-Ray news group about adding edge effects to a scene, and I realized that a paint program was a much better tool, and that some simple macros could duplicate the scene in minutes. I also saw on TV a nice portable sawhorse that converts into a large stable workbench with the addition of a door or a sheet of plywood, and it struck home that I've spent at least twice as much time setting a simple foundation for the permanent work bench I'm building as building the bench itself. Oh the woes of gravel covered dirt floor garages! Floors are a definite "to do". Here's some macros for those POV inclined, they're the floor in a POV garage so to speak.

// a line of object starting at a location and repeating at an interval
#macro LineOf(Obj StartPos IncPos Num)
  #local _COUNT = 0;
  #local _CPOS = StartPos;
  #while (_COUNT < Num)
    object {Obj translate _CPOS}
    #local _CPOS = _CPOS + IncPos;
    #local _COUNT = _COUNT + 1;
  #end
#end 

// a ring of objects starting at a location and orbiting the origin by IncRot
#macro RingOf(Obj StartPos IncRot Num)
  #local _COUNT = 0;
  #local _ROT = <0,0,0>;
  #while (_COUNT < Num)
    object {Obj translate StartPos
      rotate <_rot.x,0,0>
      rotate <0,_rot.y,0>
      rotate <0,0,_rot.z>}
    #local _ROT = _ROT + IncRot;
    #local _COUNT = _COUNT + 1;
  #end
#end 

// helix
#macro HelixOf(Obj StartPos IncRot IncPos Num)
  #local _COUNT = 0;
  #local _CPOS = StartPos;
  #local _ROT = <0,0,0>;
  #while (_COUNT < Num)
    object {Obj
      rotate <_rot.x,0,0>
      rotate <0,_rot.y,0>
      rotate <0,0,_rot.z>  
      translate _CPOS} 
    #local _ROT = _ROT + IncRot;
    #local _CPOS = _CPOS + IncPos;
    #local _COUNT = _COUNT + 1;
  #end
#end 
  
// a grid of object starting at a location and repeating at IncPos and IncPos2
#macro GridOf(Obj StartPos IncPos IncPos2 Num Num2)
  #local _COUNT2 = 0;
  #local _CPOS2 = StartPos;
  #while (_COUNT2 < Num2)
    #local _COUNT = 0;
    #local _CPOS = _CPOS2;
    #while (_COUNT < Num)
      object {Obj translate _CPOS}
      #local _CPOS = _CPOS + IncPos;
      #local _COUNT = _COUNT + 1;
    #end
    #local _CPOS2 = _CPOS2 + IncPos2;
    #local _COUNT2 = _COUNT2 + 1;
  #end
#end

Recycling Plastic

I melted some clear plastic spoons down in the oven. It's in a leftover artichoke jar. I'm not sure what kind of plastic they are, they're not really marked, if you squint it has B-4 on the handles, but it's not HDPE, it's probably some kind of PS, it was stable boiling in water, was a bit sticky at 350 F (176 C), but that might have been uneven heating from the broiler. It started gloppy flowing a bit at 400 F (210 C), so I bumped it up to 450 F (232 C), which made it pool in the bottom, but as the oven got to temperature it started smoking, so I shut it off and left it in the oven to cool slowly, so that the glass wouldn't break. Oh yeah, don't try this if you aren't ready for the jar to break, I expected it to break, I had it in a cast iron pan and it was preheated to even out the temperatures. The result is about 2 cm of hard clear plastic from having the jar full of broken pieces. As the jar cooled the plastic pulled away from the glass, making sounds that were very similar to cracking glass. There is a bit of bubbles in the plastic, but I think that this might be a workable way to cast plastic parts if you had an open faced mold, it was much to sticky to pour through a gate without something like an extruder.

Garage

I've wired 110/220 to the garage and got some cheap lights up out there, filled in the ditch and cut off one of the garage door rails that protruded far beyond the run of the door. The garage has a 12+ foot high ceiling, so there's been a lot of trips up and down the extension ladder. Most of the parts for the garage door were salvage, the door was extended to about 11 feet tall by adding sections, a standard door is 7 foot, which would have looked incredibly short on the front of a 15 foot building front. Somewhere along the line it all got messed up, but a pro garage door guy made it all work. Apparently the hinges on a garage door are not the same, they're numbered by the amount of offset from the wall brackets, not to mention the spring is different.

Still there's some leftover parts like a nice flat aluminum rail and some lumber. I've been thinking of building a Replicating Rapid-Prototyper (RepRap) , or some sort of Computer Numerical Control (CNC) mill. I've been unemployed for too many years and hope to at least break even selling something I can produce. The idea of being able to afford some of the equipment that can produce commercial quality output is exciting to me. The technical aspects are well within my grasp.

A little about me, I have a BS in computer science from St. Martin's University and a AS in electronics engineering tech from Pierce College, additionally I spent a year at Central Washington University studying electrical engineering, that was a turbulent time in my early life, I was married for a year, and I'm not sure I've ever really recovered from the divorce, I've been depressed and become an overweight middle aged escapist computer addict that lives with his aging retired mother. (God bless her.) I've got to do something to get out of this rut. On the positive side I've learned to be good with graphics editors, like Wings3d, that can be used to design parts for RepRap, I've also recently been programming in Haskell, a few years back I was doing some Java, before that it was C++. The list of computer languages that I've had contact with is somewhat large. When I was a kid they used to let us into the DOT offices after hours to mess with the computers and watch the payroll checks be printed out.

Earlier Idea

This is an earlier idea for a stepper rotor made from easy to find stuff, just a ring of holes to accept cut pieces of wire. You just drill the holes in a flat cylinder of something and then use a lathe to eat away the outer layer until the metal shows. I don't have a lathe and drilling that accurate of holes (100 of them!) would be a problem too.

Stepper Refinements

I was thinking about it some more, and figured that some small registration tabs might help line up the support to the caps while attaching, does PVC pipe glue work on the various kinds of plastic? While lining up the tabs I realized that the bottom cap is different from the top cap, it's mirrored, it won't line up right just rotating it, so you can't just print two that are the same. So while I was at it I added some mounting brackets. I also enlarged the files to mm scale, as this is the RepRap default.

Cap Top, Cap Base, Support, Rotor, Bearing-Clip