{"id":596,"date":"2009-11-27T10:53:35","date_gmt":"2009-11-27T14:53:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/?p=596"},"modified":"2025-03-22T06:35:55","modified_gmt":"2025-03-22T10:35:55","slug":"openscad-a-love-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/2009\/11\/openscad-a-love-story\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenSCAD: A Love Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ok, maybe that’s a bit strong, but I’d definitely say we’re dating. I heard about OpenSCAD from the Make Blog<\/a>, and with a belly fully of thanksgiving turkey I tried it out. I agree with the Make post and the referenced Thingiverse post<\/a> : In the right hands, designing the right parts, this is a game changer. I played around with it for maybe 3 hours, and was able to generate this:<\/p>\n

\"burr<\/a><\/p>\n

Insane. I’ve been toying with the idea of making a grist mill using burr plates. The main hurdle for me was visualizing all the different angles and how they would interact. I tried drawing one in SketchUp, but after many hours, I threw in the towel. Before OpenSCAD came along I was trying to build the mental momentum to draw the plate in Processing<\/a>! Seriously. I was going to use their 3D libraries and a TON of math so I could play with a parametrized model.<\/p>\n

\"burr<\/a><\/p>\n

Speaking of coding, I should also mention that the code to generate the model is TINY. I’ve spread it out and commented it here, but in rough-and-dirty form, the code is less than 10 lines. 10 LINES! I’m free to edit any of the parameters, re-render, and a new model pops right up. Great stuff. <\/p>\n

So I’d say there’s a new tool in the tool-box. It’s by no means the only one I’ll use, but certain modeling tasks just got a heck of a lot easier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ok, maybe that’s a bit strong, but I’d definitely say we’re dating. I heard about OpenSCAD from the Make Blog, and with a belly fully of thanksgiving turkey I tried it out. I agree with the Make post and the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[23,24],"class_list":["post-596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-projects","tag-burr_plate","tag-openscad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7230,"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions\/7230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}