For the past few months I’ve been messing around with django and writing a web-based inventory system thing for Hive76. One of my goals was to auto-generated nice renders of STL files people attach a-la Thingiverse. Sure, I could have just asked Zach, but where’s the fun in that? Since I don’t know a damn thing about 3D modeling or any of the tools used for this, it ended up taking me a lot longer than I expected. The result is this very short shell script, with all of the work being done by stl2pov and povray, with a little help from the Axes and Grid Macro to pretty things up a bit. Here is the povray template I’m using and here is the shell script:

#!/bin/bash

STL=$1
BASEFILE=`echo "$STL" | sed -e 's/\.stl//g'`
OUTFILE=${BASEFILE}.png
POVFILE=${BASEFILE}.pov
INCFILE=${BASEFILE}.inc

stl2pov -s "$STL" > "${INCFILE}"
MODELNAME=`grep "#declare" "${INCFILE}" | cut -d\  -f2`
cat pov_layout.tmpl | sed -e "s/{{INCLUDE_FILE}}/${INCFILE}/g" \
       -e "s/{{MODELNAME}}/${MODELNAME}/g" > "${POVFILE}"
povray -s -i"${POVFILE}" +FN +W1600 +H1200 -o"${OUTFILE}" +Q9 +AM2 +A2
echo "OUTFILE: ${OUTFILE}"

That’s it!

I still haven’t made the script intelligent about camera positioning relative to model size, but since most of the models we design are intended to be printed on our MakerBot, the hard-coded values seem to work pretty well. Anyway, if you know about this stuff and see something I could do better, or you have any other cool ideas, I’m all ears.

A few weeks ago, my buddy fynflood hit me up on IRC (yeah, we’re oldschool) because he needed help with a project. It would appear our boy got some strange notion in his head that his old lady needed to be gettin’ wifed up here pretty soon, so instead of going the traditional route, he decided to design her a cool ring and print it out at Hive76 on our brand-spankin’-new MakerBot. That’s where yours truly comes in. See, our boy fynflood hasn’t earned his SketchUp merit badge yet, so he tossed me a png he designed in gimp, which I traced and scaled to a standard ring size. There were some issues with smoothing surfaces and not printing solid, but he worked them out and was able to present her with the ring on their trip to Iceland. She said yes. Score one for the nerdy dudes.

Successful marriage proposal via 3D-printed ring – Boing Boing.

I spent last weekend in Columbus skating with my buddies. We shot a few clips on Saturday at the Powell Skatepark, which you can watch on Vimeo. Mark wanted some stills from the video, so I exported the video to an image sequence in QuickTime and whipped up a quick image pager in PHP (src) to make it a little easier to find good frames. My favorite part is the weird superimposing of frames that makes it look like we’re skating with ghosts… which we totally are.

I’m not sure how this little guy got by me, but I’ve got to hand it to Suzuki for bringing out this cool little bike. If you know me at all, you know my regular ride is a 1975 Honda CB125. It’s a little small, and I have to sit on the back seat, but it gets somewhere around 100MPG and is the most fun I’ve ever had on two wheels. I haven’t had a chance to ride the new TU250X, but if it’s anything like the vintage Suzuki GT/GT series, I’m sure it’s just as fun. Combine that with modern fuel injection, 80mpg+ EPA rating, and the sub $4k price tag, and I’d say it’s got some serious potential. Now if only it had a kick-start and Suzuki put up some gallery pictures that weren’t of chicks riding it…

Wow, this has been a really good week for companies getting their heads out of their collective asses, hardware-wise. Apple is finally offering a matte display option for the 15″ MacBook Pro, just like its 17″ big brother. Had they done this from the beginning, I would be typing on one right now, instead of my last-gen BlackBook. Not that there’s anything wrong with you, baby. You know I love you. Don’t look at me like that.

Apple Again Offers Matte Display Option on 15″ MacBook Pro – Mac Rumors.

Ever since the T-Mobile/Google G1 came out, people have had to deal with my ranting about the lack of standard 1/8″ (3.5mm) headphone jack on the device. Yeah, I know you can get an adapter for it, but I had the same exact complaint about my Game Boy Advance SP.

Apparently, according to Engadget (and the photos provided), it would appear that HTC has finally heard my cries for standardized accessory ports. But are they too late? I recently caved to my company’s efforts to outfit me with the standard issue Blackberry Curve, which already has a headphone jack AND uses the same Mini USB jack as my personal Dumb Phone (Motorola L2), where the Touch Pro2 still gets the proprietary ExtUSB connection. I’m not saying that Mini USB is better, especially since I’ve had two physical failures on previous devices, but the fewer adapters I have to haul around, the better. Good job, HTC, but let’s keep with the improvements.

Sprint HTC Touch Pro2 shows up sporting a 3.5mm headphone jack.

My good buddy Adam back in Columbus made this laser driven remote camera trigger using an Arduino and chdk. Check out hackaday and his site for details. Congrats, Adam!

Arduino camera laser trigger – Hack a Day.

I kind of fell out of web comics for a long time, only subscribing to xkcd so that I had something more entertaining to talk about when somebody started steering a conversation toward the mystical benefits of coding in Python (until I can instantiate real live ponies, I’m not buying it). Lucky for me, I have the good people over at Geekologie looking out for my best interests. Lucky for you, I have given up my dreams of trying to incorporate that fish that I can only draw going one direction into a comic, and have resigned myself to just passing along links that other, more entertaining blogs provide.

Take a jump on over to alienlovespredator.com for some good stuff.

If you follow my Google Reader Feed, or read Cool Tools, you’ve probably seen this bad boy before. Apparently, my loving girlfriend felt so guilty that I still had not redeemed my “birthday coupon” (supposedly good for one free winter jacket, not the other thing) that she decided to take matters into her own hands and order me something that I specifically told her I wanted. Two days later, this magnificent contraption showed up from Soda Stream, USA – coincidentally the same day as my recent Mouser order, which I’ll tell you about later.

If you don’t know, I’m a big fan of soda in general. Specifically, I am a Dr. Pepper junkie, though I like pretty much anything cherry flavored, love Mt. Dew and Cream Soda. Also, prefer Coke over Pepsi. I’ve talked about having a soda fountain in my house for years, but like most projects, never pulled the trigger. I was a bit skeptical about the functionality of the Fountain Jet, but for $100, what can you really expect? They also have a 30-day Satisfaction Guarantee, if you’re into returning things you hate, instead of squirreling them away to find and regret for years to come, like I do.

So, if you’re not big on reading descriptions and tend to get distracted by pretty pictures and shiny things, let me go ahead and point out right now that all of Soda Club’s syrups include Splenda. What??? That’s right. Regardless of whether you want diet or regular soda, you will still get at least 50% Splenda. I didn’t realize this until I had made my first bottle of cola flavored soda, tasted it, commented on the “diet taste”, and read the ingredients. Blech! Whatever. I’ll just find a supply of Dr. Pepper syrup after I run through the rest of this crap. I read somewhere that the cola flavor has the strongest Splenda taste, so here’s to hoping the ginger ale and Sprite ripoff we also got are better. I will say that the important part, the carbonation unit, works like a charm. I was a little concerned with getting the lower price-point plastic unit, but it seems fairly sturdy and well constructed. It quickly turned my Britta filtered bottle of Philly’s Finest into… well, something temporarily worse, but fizzy, and significantly better once the flavor was added. I’m still amazed that some people actively pursue carbonated water as a beverage.

As a side note, I did add a little bit of sugar to one of my glasses and it definitely improved the taste. This is probably a bit silly and I wouldn’t do this very often. Obviously, when I want to make my soda taste better, I’ll just add whiskey.

Like any dude, I usually hate babies. This baby, however, is an awesome piece of machinery! This guy built a 1/6th scale Chevy V8 Engine! I’ve always wanted to rip apart an engine, from top to bottom, and rebuild it completely. I’ve done a lot of carb rebuilds on motorcycles, and even once replaced the head gasket of my 1995 Honda Civic, but I’ve never had an entire engine completely disassembled. They should really make these as kits. I’m sure tons of schools would buy them for learning, and a lot of geeks would buy them just to rev the engines and play Speed Racer. What I want to know is where he finds the tiny spark plugs…

via Make: Online : Working Chevy V8 model motor