IN this iteration of Keep It Local, I’d like to talk about design process a wee bit, and why it's a good idea to work things out with a pen and paper long before you go anywhere near touching things filled with electrified silicon, no matter how cute it might look.
…sigh.
I try to keep the shape models I design within the limits of what a spreadsheet can process, there's a wee bit of trig involved with them and when you're mapping straight edges onto curved surfaces, decimal points become important.
Discovery is important, as well. As the page above attests by its big fat NOPE, there would be an ugly gap where panels would never even try to meet, even with hefty amounts of union labor.
The second iteration is more promising, but it, too, had surprises in store.
Namely the trajectory of the edges around that inner triangle wouldn’t be meeting the actual face of the triangle because of that aforementioned straight lines on curved surfaces thingysitchuamation. The solution, hopefully, is to design a little lip on that inner edge. Always a tense moment—just because you have calculated some sums around a triangle, doesn't mean that triangle can actually exist in the physical world. Fortunately it looks like this one does.
And so we move on to LibreCAD. I realize, of course, there’s a wee amount of liminal hypocrisy on my above missive about the embrace of silicon. But I stand by my words; everything I’m doing here could be boiled down to operations using an abacus, compass, protractor, pen, and paper. Don’t get me wrong, it would be a pain in the pa-toot, but I would know every step along the way, in a manner that I wound not if this was getting churned out of a data center.
triangles…triangles…more triangles…
and now to print out a test case and see how we’re doing. Nothing like making a physical model to keep you humble. Humble and connected. The physicality of hearing the scissors slice the paper, the necessity of keeping that paper in tension, the delicacy of folding cardstock just so…
snipsnipgluestickgluestickcodeofHammurabi…
And we are done! About eight hours labor because of waiting for glue to dry. There's still some alterations i want to make for connecting hardware, but i really like the rectangular openings…perfect for windows or solar panels or maybe, if we're getting crazy, doors.
A spherical version might make a nice suncatcher or birdhouse. Hmmmm….
This is a four-frequency octahedral symmetry we are working with, so if that frequency was increased, so too would the number of openings, and would be smaller in size for the same volume.
I dunno, what do YOU think?