Online Cad Systems

This is pretty cool

Cell Cycle webGL design app – a dynamic physible from Nervous System on Vimeo.

It’s an online CAD system that gives a basic framework for a fairly complex object, and then lets the relatively unskilled tweak to their own peculiar tastes… then output a file that will make it. Actual, actually make it in real actual reality – with a 3D printer.

I’m going to get into doing this when the 3D machines come from across the waves… I’ve been playing with OpenJScad recently… it’s a library that allows you to do simple CAD stuff using Javascript. A web-language in other words. Only works in Chrome for the moment… but that’s ok, because you can just download Chrome, and Internet Explorer can FUCK OFF because in another 7 years, the browser that web-devs will have to write for will look like this:

only it will actually be worse than that, because there will be over 70 variants within that.

I’m not supporting Internet Explorer from now on. I just don’t care anymore. I have an audience, and none of them use fucking IE. Right now I have Chrome, Opera and Firefox all running at the same time. They’re all good for what they’re good for – the only thing IE is good for is checking to see if websites work in IE. Forget it. It’s over.

Anyway – OpenJScad is pretty good – I made this for it:

http://www.weirdsky.com/CAD/

It has the ability (built in) to create forms with dropdowns so people can make their own variants. Tis the future I tellee… for a while at least. I quite like it because it (like the web itself) is a text-based scripting language (rather than a GUI)… and being a web-dev, I find that reassuring. Unfortunately Chrome has a built-in limit to its stack-size, so if you try to make the resolution too small it will crash. But… there it is. Pretty cool.

Speaking of which though, check this out:

Nanocale 3D printing using resin and lasers.

I think the resin stuff that it uses is pretty expensive ($300 a litre?) but if you’re making nanoscale things you’re probably not going to be using very much of it.