Intro and a few examples

dale

Welcome Evan
As someone born in Calgary, Fortress popped right out at me. I figured it out one time, and I think I spent about 2 years of my life hiking in the Kananaskis, and Sheep River areas, when I added all those hikes up.
It sounds like your coding, and problem solving skills will be a great addition to the community.
Welcome aboard!

Evan

@mitcorb said:

Welcome, Evan.
Hope to hear and see more from you.
Are talents and abilities such as yours, and social graces really mutually exclusive?

Reminds me of a joke that has more truth to it than most.

How can you tell that an engineer has an outgoing personality?

When he talks to you he looks at your shoes instead of his own.

I just love programs such as SketchUp. It allows me to easily illustrate what I see in my mind's eye. I think entirely in visual terms and have no trouble seeing things in my mind in full 3D. SketchUp is the best tool I have found so far that allows me to easily and quickly give these internal images an external reality, even if it is "virtual". Together with my home shop and CNC capability I can then change that virtuality into a real object with real function.

The telescope I am currently building is designed entirely in SU7 down to the smallest detail.

Here are a few views.

This is a part for the telescope as designed in SU7. Note that this image isn't a render but is from SU7.

These are the actual parts made with a small 20 ton press after cutting on my CNC mill. A small design change was made in the CAD-CAM program after exporting from SU.

This is a render of the main optical tube assembly.

Evan

I am not sure what problem you refer to. There is an issue using small scale models in Kerkythea. It seems to be using integer math for speed but that causes real problems with models that have features measured in thousandths of an inch. One model I did recently had to be scaled up by a factor of 100 to render with acceptable accuracy.

It was this one. Can anybody spot the rather significant shortcut I took to make this easier to model?

mitcorb

I wonder how you reacted to the small faces, scale up scale down "problem" in Sketchup.
Edit: Of course, you have been at this for longer than me and probably outgrew it.

Edit, again: I liked the joke about the engineer

mitcorb

Would it be imposing an image of internal threading in the output?

Evan

No, that would really be cheating and hard to do anyway. The "threads" aren't threads at all since they aren't helical. I only modeled 1/5 of the part and then copied it to make the full model.

So what is the "faces" problem?

mitcorb

Sketchup's intentionally imposed limitation of not facing geometry smaller than 1mm or .001", I believe in direct modeling. You can scale up, model stuff with faces that will be smaller than this when you scale down, and the faces will remain after scale down. This may be an oversimplification. Lots of past discussion in this Forum.

Evan

Ok, now I know what you mean. That issue goes far beyond just creating faces. It is directly tied to how the inference engine works to autosnap lines together so the geometry isn't left open. If it didn't do that there would be major problems with users that freehand draw instead of using the measurements window to specifiy precise node locations. It would be nice if the autosnap function was adjustable to less than .001" but there are some workarounds that can be used.

Rich O Brien

Hi Evan,

Welcome to SCF!

That's one of the most interesting intros I read in a while.

Rich

Evan

Hmm. The Chinese have a saying "May you live in interesting times". In that particular use the word interesting is near to being a curse.

Here are a couple of more renders of a planetary transmission. This is for possible use in an electric trike project that I have built and am experimenting with. The trike is intended to be a hybrid utilizing electric and petrol power as a true hybrid where the petrol engine operates as an assist to the electric system. Note that I am not in business not do I have any plans to start one. Any developments such as this are free for anyone to use if they think it worthwhile.

This is the concept drawing of the trike:

This is the actual development vehicle: