Kellbot!

Reflections on the Whole Wedding Thing

June 24, 2010 in Personal by Kellbot | 4 comments

First off, this post isn’t about LEGOs or code, it’s about my personal life, so if you’re just here for the bits and bytes you can skip it.

Folks may or may not know that at the end of April I became engaged to my wonderful boyfriend Chris aka RevolvingDork.

I used to ask my mom what her dream house would be like, and she’d reply “I don’t dream about houses.” I thought this was a weird response until I started looking at wedding stuff. And realized… I don’t dream about weddings. And at first, navigating the behemoth that is the wedding industry seemed very daunting and off-putting. I positioned myself squarely as the anti-bride, determined to have the smallest wedding possible with the least amount of drama.

When it turned out Chris wanted what I kept referring to as “a big stupid wedding,” well, it became clear I was going to need a bit of an attitude adjustment. What’s happened since then, in regard to the wedding and all that it encompasses, has been really interesting and not at all what I expected (in a good way!).

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Meta Lego Storage

June 20, 2010 in LEGO, crafting, lased by Postling | 7 comments

In need of a way to organize and store my Lego obsession, I made a bunch of acrylic boxes which not only hold Legos, but also stack and interlock similarly:

Each brick box holds 64+ of the same-shape piece. So the 1×1 box will hold 64 1×1 bricks, and the 2×2 holds 64 2×2 bricks. The larger ones hold a few more due to how the sizing works out. The 1×1 box is 40mm per side (external dimensions).

I posted the patterns on Thingiverse should anyone wish to make their own. No, I'm not going to make and sell them. They're time consuming to make, and plus I'm pretty sure Lego would sue me. If you don't have access to a laser cutter, I'd suggest using a service like Ponoko.

The patterns were generated in OpenSCAD using the following code. Change "rows" and "cols" to get the lego size you desire. By the way, I’m teaching a class on OpenSCAD in Brooklyn next weekend!

fundamental_unit = 0.8;
thickness =3;
h_pitch = 10;
v_pitch = 12;
tform = 5;
knob = fundamental_unit*h_pitch*tform;
module side(rows){
	lwidth = rows*fundamental_unit*h_pitch*tform;
	lheight = v_pitch*fundamental_unit*tform;
	difference() {
 
		square(size=[lwidth, lheight]);
		translate(v=[10,0,0]) square(size=[lwidth-20,thickness]);
		translate(v=[10,lheight-thickness,0]) square(size=[lwidth-20,thickness]);
		square(size=[thickness, 10]);
		translate(v=[0,lheight-10]) square(size=[thickness, 10]);
	translate(v=[lwidth-thickness,10]) square(size=[thickness, lheight-20]);
	}
}
module top(rows,cols,holes){
	lwidth = rows*fundamental_unit*h_pitch*tform;
	llength = cols*fundamental_unit*h_pitch*tform;
	difference(){
		square(size=[lwidth,llength]);
		square(size=[thickness,10]);
		square(size=[10,thickness]);
		translate(v=[lwidth,0,0]) square(size=[-thickness,10]);
		translate(v=[lwidth,0,0]) square(size=[-10,thickness]);
		translate(v=[lwidth,llength]) square(size=[-10,-thickness]);
		translate(v=[lwidth,llength]) square(size=[-thickness,-10]);	
		translate(v=[0,llength]) square(size=[10,-thickness]);
		translate(v=[0,llength]) square(size=[thickness,-10]);	
		if(holes==true){
			for (i = [1:cols]){
				for (j=[1:rows]){
				translate(v=[j*knob-knob/2,i*knob-(fundamental_unit*h_pitch*tform)/2,0]) circle(r=fundamental_unit*6*tform/2);
				}
			}
		}
	}
}
 
rows = 2;
cols = 4;
 
h_spacing =  rows*fundamental_unit*h_pitch*tform+10;
l_spacing =  cols*fundamental_unit*h_pitch*tform+10;
v_spacing = fundamental_unit*v_pitch*tform+10;
 
side(rows);
translate(v=[ rows*fundamental_unit*h_pitch*tform+10,0,0]) side(rows);
translate(v=[0,v_spacing]) side(cols);
translate(v=[ cols*fundamental_unit*h_pitch*tform+10,v_spacing]) side(cols);
translate(v=[0,2*v_spacing]) top(rows,cols,true);
translate(v=[ rows*fundamental_unit*h_pitch*tform+10,2*v_spacing]) top(rows,cols,false);

In the next batch I'm going to make the nubs a little smaller than the holes. They work now, but it's a bit fiddly getting everything to line up just so. A little more forgiveness would be nice. Also, OpenSCAD does strange things with circles. Rather than simply write a circle in the DXF, it represents it as a bunch of line segments. I’m not sure if there’s a way around this, but it’s marginally irritating.

You can download a .dxf for a few different box sizes on Thingiverse.
I’ve also created a Flickr Collection for my various Lego stuff.

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3D Modeling by Numbers: Learn to use OpenSCAD

June 17, 2010 in hacking by Postling | No comments

Want to learn to create 3D models, but find the user interface for most 3D modeling programs too infuriating? OpenSCAD may be for you! And we're teaching a class on how to use it on Sunday, June 27!

OpenSCAD is "The Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeler." Rather than learn tricky user interfaces and navigate seemingly endless obscure menus, OpenSCAD uses a simple scripting language to generate 3D models from either existing or new 2D drawings. We'll start in 2D (great for creating designs for the laser cutter) and move into 3D modeling (perfect for MakerBot!).

A basic understanding of computer programming is helpful but not required. Sign up at EventBrite today!

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I’m Sorry Nintendo, What?

June 15, 2010 in Personal by Kellbot | 3 comments

This morning Nintendo had their keynote at E3, unveiling the new 3DS. As part of the event, they had an army of models bring 3DS units into the audience, to let people get up close with the hot new hardware.

Look carefully at the image. All the models are women. All of them. I looked through as much footage of the keynote as I could find, and I can’t find a single dude in that group.

I’m generally the last person to get up in arms about stuff like this. But really, what the fuck Nintendo. Wake up. Women play games. Women design games. Women produce games. Women write games. And while the audience at E3 undoubtedly skews male, is that really an excuse to use women exclusively as furniture at your press events? It says a lot to me that the only women on that stage are there as set dressing. Specifically, it tells me I don’t want to buy your products. It upsets me on a deep level to see this sort of BS from a company I like and have spent thousands of dollars with over the years.

Look, I’m not trying to funnel all of feminism into this one photo, or say that it’s not OK to have hot women hawking your stuff. I’ve got no problem with hiring attractive people to show off your products. It’s marketing and it works. But the number of women interested in gaming has exploded lately. And I’ll let you in on a secret: you don’t have to paint everything pink and brand it with Lady Gaga to market to us. You just need to stop acting like we don’t exist.

Update: A few folks have asked, why get upset about just this. Why not booth babes (a staple of industry events for god knows how long) as well? After talking it out with my fiancee, who doesn’t quite get what I’m so up in arms about, he summed it up pretty well:

so the scale of the model force needed highlights the fact that it could not possibly have been an oversight to include men … [making it] worse than the average smaller scale promotion where the gender preference is merely implied.

Yeah, that’s about right. After all, I find it hard to believe that LA has a shortage of male and female models looking for work.

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More Legos From 3D Meshes

June 14, 2010 in LEGO, hacking by Postling | 9 comments

I've been doing more Lego building from models. This time I made sort of an abstract mushroom tree forest thing. More photos are available on Flickr.

Here's the original model (left) and the resulting cubeified model after running it through AddCells (right):

I realized of course that with everything grey, it was very difficult to determine which bricks of which color were needed where. So I un-joined the primitives in the original model and ran AddCells on each one individually. I used different colored "cell" blocks for each one, and the resulting models kept the color:

Each peice needed to be moved a little bit so that all the blocks lined up, but other than that it worked pretty well.

Because each piece is separate, I couldn't use the hide tool to "slice" each layer. But I did find out something interesting: each "cube" in the new models is actually a vertex. I honestly don't understand a ton about how that's pulled off, but basically instead of being a point on a line, each vertex represents another object, the source cube.

In order to slice up the model, I wrote a script to delete all but a given layer, with layer 1 being the bottom layer, up to however many layers of cubes are in the model.

import Blender, BPyMessages, BPyMesh
from Blender import Scene, Mesh, NMesh, Window, sys, Group, Object, Draw
from Blender.Mathutils import \
	Matrix, Vector, ProjectVecs, AngleBetweenVecs, TranslationMatrix
 
 
def trimToLayer(selected,layerNumber, blockHeight,offset):
        toDelete= []
 
        mesh = selected.getData(mesh=1)
        tmesh = NMesh.GetRawFromObject(selected.name)
        tmesh.transform(selected.matrix)
        #Delete verticies above the current layer
        for v in tmesh.verts:
            if v.co[2] > blockHeight*layer:
                toDelete.append(v.index)
        if layerNumber > 1:
                #Delete verticies below the current layer
                for v in tmesh.verts:
                    if v.co[2] < blockHeight*layer-1:
                        toDelete.append(v.index)        
        toDelete = list(set(toDelete))
 
        mesh.verts.delete(toDelete)
        Window.Redraw()
 
 
##################3
if __name__ == "__main__":
    selection = Object.GetSelected();
 
    layer = Draw.PupIntInput("Layer",1,0,100)
    Blender.SaveUndoState('Kill Everything')  
    print "\nTrimming First Layer"
    for s in selection:
	bbox = s.getBoundBox(1)
	print bbox[0][2]
	trimToLayer(s,layer,1.2,bbox[0][2])

There are a couple problems with the script: primarily, I couldn't find a way to get the software to save a screenshot (ctrl+F3 normally). Because of this, I couldn't loop through the whole thing at once, I had to go through one layer at a time, running the script, hitting ctrl+f3, saving the image, lather rinse repeat. It was tedious, though not as tedious as manually cutting up each layer. But almost.

The resulting MRI-like were used to build the model. The exact placement of which bricks and where is left as an excercise to the reader. A few layers (from the bottom, middle, and towards the top) are shown below.

This is my first attempt at a Blender script, and admittedly one of my first times using blender, so any feedback on how to streamline this process would be appreciated.

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Fixed: WordPress MU Uploaded Image Display Issues

June 10, 2010 in Programming by Kellbot | No comments

Just a quick fix for something I couldn’t find earlier:

If you’re on shared hosting which has PHP’s safe_mode enabled, you may run into problems with uploading images. Specifically, you can upload images just fine (assuming you’ve configured uploads correctly) but can’t see uploaded files. This is the case on NearlyFreeSpeech.Net (where my sites are hosted), and probably a few other hosts as well.

WordPress MU uses some .htaccess & PHP tomfoolery to obfuscate the real file path (among other things). Because safe_mode checks to see if the UID/GUIDs match on file_exists(), the script that fetches the images will fail and return a 404. Which is to say, the owner/group of the uploaded file is web/web (or whatever your server’s web user is), but since I manually uploaded the WPMU files originally, those are me/me. Since me != web, it failed. WordPress took this to mean the file was absent and returned 404.

On NearlyFreeSpeech, adding wp-content/blogs.php to the ‘web’ group was all it needed.

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Too Long for Twitter

June 9, 2010 in Business by Postling | No comments

My friend Adam said something which is too long for twitter or Facebook, but realy to excellent to be confined to my inbox. We were discussing the topics of the upcoming Ignite NYC, and how it's become (always was?) a bit… buzz-wordy.

Ignite is leveraged to provide out-of-the-box solutions for thinking
outside of the box! By inner left joining your assets to the
blogosphere's most whuffie-laden creatives, you can provide a rich
canvas for your stakeholders to express their content-driven buy-in.
Generate partnerships, leads, and "branded civil unions" while
managing your passionate identity and getting hella sticky eyeball
clickthru! You'll can't best these practices, folks.

Synergy. Pure synergy.

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From Polygons to Voxels to LEGO: A Utah Teapot

May 30, 2010 in LEGO, hacking by Postling | 4 comments

It was only after hours of searching that I finally came up with what I was looking for: a way to take a polygon mesh (OBJ or similar) and convert it into a blueprint for building LEGO sculptures.

Don't get me wrong, there are tons of tools out there for LEGO CAD. But strangely none of them mention being able to go from a mesh to a LEGO layout. It's surprising, since it seems like such a natural fit. The rise of 3D printers has rejuvinated interest in voxels, voulmetric pixels, and as evidenced by all the LEGO sculpture artists we seem to be in a golden age of LEGO.

Armed with Blender and a giant LEGO collection, I set out to get the computer to do the hard work for me. I used Blender, graph paper, a pencil, and of course lots of LEGOs.

Step 1: Voxelizing a Utah teapot

Let me preface this by saying that the Blender UI is not for the faint of heart. I took classes on Rhino and 3DSMax in college, and thought to myself "how different could it be?" The answer: very. If you're new to blender, don't fear the manual. You're going to need it, particularly the parts on installing/using python scripts.

To voxelize the teapot I used a script called Add Cells which covers the surface of any object with any other object. First I imported the teapot, and scaled it up a bit. Then I created my "fundamental unit" of LEGO. LEGOs have an aspect ratio of 6:5, so I created a 1×1 LEGO, a 0.6×0.5×0.5 rectangular prism in Blender.

Selecting both the teapot and my 1×1 lego I ran the Add Cells script (go to the Scripts menu –> Add -> Cells). I chose the Teapot for my object to be voxelized and the 1×1 LEGO as my voxel model.

Tada! A blocky teapot!

Step 2: Graphing each layer on paper

In order to make the build process easier, I went through layer by layer and drew a map of each layer on graph paper. This way when building with LEGOs I could shade in with a pencil each voxel I'd built. It sounds redundant, but when things all start looking the same after a few minutes and something isn't lining up, it's very helpful.

To see one layer at a time in Blender I went into Sculpture Mode, side view, and used ctrl+shift+right mouse to select and hide all but the layer I wanted to see. Then I switched to Top view and copied the layer onto my graph paper. By the end I had a sheet of paper full of wobbly circular outlines.

Step 3: Building it with LEGOs!

The completed model uses 244 LEGOs, many of which are tiny 1×1 and 1×2 bricks. The model is hollow, but the walls need to be fairly thick to be able to support the top. As it is I probably should have made things a little thicker; putting the last two layers on was a delicate operation.

I built each layer sequentially. There were a few overhang pieces near the bottom which I had to append to the layer above them, since they couldn't anchor to anything below.

Overall the project took about 4 hours, with a break in the middle for breakfast, church, etc.

Total LEGO count for the project was 244 individual bricks, distributed thusly:

44 2×3 Bricks
46 2×2 Bricks
58 2×4 Bricks
27 1×2 Bricks
17 1×3 Bricks
8 1×4 Bricks
8 2×2 L shaped Bricks
33 1×1 Bricks
1 2×8 Brick
1 2×6 Brick
1 1×8 Brick

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My First Lego Ovoids

May 27, 2010 in LEGO, crafting by Postling | 1 comment

After ordering a few hundred bricks from bricklink, I started working on what is for now a top secret project.

Step one was to practice making spherical and organic LEGO shapes, and I'm pretty happy with the two sphereoids I came up with while catching up on House. PS, Dr House is a huge jerk.

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Success!

May 20, 2010 in hacking by Kellbot | 4 comments

Now that I have a few more runs worth of data, I was able to pick a little bit of information out of the miCoach binaries.

There are 40 EXRCS001.BIN files on the device (after the data has been unpacked), each one corresponding to an individual workout. This means you can store up to 40 workouts before you need to sync the device again. Knowing that, I had a bit of a better idea what I was looking at.

The miCoach pacer records various data points periodically – every few seconds as far as I can tell. The record length for these data points is 14 bytes. So far we have:
0x1E – row number, increments one each row
0×21 – distance
0×23 & 0×24 – Not sure exactly what the values are, but these dropped to 0 at a point where I paused the pacer and the miCoach graph shows a stride/pace of 0
0×25 – stride rate
0×26 – same situation as 0×23 and 0×24
0×27 – heart rate
0×28 – Not sure what this is, but it’s the same for each row
0×29 – time in. I think this is in seconds, but I’m not sure. It goes up by 5 each record.

At the start of the file, from 0×07 to 0×10, is a bunch of data that I suspect to be the date but haven’t figured out an obvious format. For my workout on 5/20/2010 9:58am, the hex values are 01 5A 4F B4 3C A7 53 B4 3C 24 8C

Yay progress!

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« Older entries § Newer entries »

Reflections on the Whole Wedding Thing

Meta Lego Storage

3D Modeling by Numbers: Learn to use OpenSCAD

I’m Sorry Nintendo, What?

More Legos From 3D Meshes

Fixed: WordPress MU Uploaded Image Display Issues

Too Long for Twitter

From Polygons to Voxels to LEGO: A Utah Teapot

My First Lego Ovoids

Success!

Projects

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