August 25, 2010
 

CloudSCAD Blog

I created a blog just for CloudSCAD at http://blog.cloudscad.com

And oh yeah, here's a video of CloudSCAD on an iPad.  Sometimes I even impress myself!

Filed under  //   cloudscad   makerbot   rails   reprap   ruby   rubyonrails  

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August 22, 2010
 

CloudSCAD

This is a little premature, but I wanted to share some progress I've made today on an idea I've been thinking about for a while now.  When I'm not hacking on 3D printers, my day job is web development so it's about time I start using my real skills for this stuff.  I call it CloudSCAD - it's OpenSCAD for the web.  It lets you write, share, mashup, and customize parametric 3D models using the OpenSCAD scripting language all within the browser and doesn't require anything to be installed locally.

As you can see in this screenshot, one of the cool things it does is parse the OpenSCAD script looking for parameters.  Then presents those variables in a friendly HTML form so that people can modify an object for their needs and click a button to download the customized STL file suitable for printing on a 3D printer.  They don't have to know anything about OpenSCAD, install anything, or touch a line of code.  Also, the author of the script doesn't have to do anything special - just put some well placed comments in their code.

What you can't see is the edit page.  I'm using Bespin to provide a syntax color coded editor for writing scripts.  I hope it will eventually include code completion and a few other things.  In some ways this is (or could be) even better than the editor in OpenSCAD itself.

There is a REST api.  For instance, you'd be able to download this script by going to http://cloudscad.com/scripts/1.scad and the stl output by going to http://cloudscad.com/scripts/1.stl and say you wanted the hole to be 8mm in diameter you could say http://cloudscad.com/scripts/1.stl?hole_diameter=8 Eventually you may even be able to say http://cloudscad.com/scripts/1.gcode, but I'm getting ahead of myself...

Like I said, this is pretty premature.  I've registered CloudSCAD.com but there's nothing there for you to see yet.  Everything you see in that screenshot and what I've described is finished, though.  Not too bad for one days work.  ;)

Filed under  //   makerbot   openscad   rails   reprap   ruby   rubyonrails  

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January 18, 2007
 

Ruby on Rails OSX Console Aliases

I found that every day when I goto work in the morning I do the same things whenever I go to work on a rails project:

  1. open firefox
  2. open iTerm
  3. cd ~/Code/railsprojectx
  4. mate .
  5. script/server
  6. open another tab in iTerm
  7. svn update
  8. goto http://localhost:3000

Sure it only takes a few seconds, but it wasn’t very DRY. :) I figured I could create a shell alias to basically reduce all that to a single command. I also thought I’d finally start giving mongrel a try. So this is what I came up with for an rdev command (along with a bunch of my other rails related aliases):

alias rdev='svn update;mate .;mongrel_rails start -d;sleep 2;open http://localhost:3000;tail -f log/development.log'

alias ss='script/server'
alias sc='script/console'
alias sg='script/generate'
alias sp='script/plugin'
alias sr='script/runner'
alias rt='rake test'
alias rtu='rake test:units'
alias rtr='rake test:recent'
alias mr='mongrel_rails start -d'
alias mrs='mongrel_rails stop'

Just stick that in your ~/.profile file and either reopen your console or run:

. ~/.profile

Filed under  //   osx   programming   rails   ruby  

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