New Media Fun

In order for me to personally justify the future investment into a 3D printer. I need to give myself reasons that it will be worth while.

The other weekend, I decided to replace the auto lock mechanism in my Mazda. The replacement part was $55. Once I got into the door and removed the broken module I opened it up to inspect the guts of the unit. It is a fairly simple device that includes a small electric motor, gears, springs, a switch and a plastic piston that moved the lock.

The piston was connected to a gear and it had snapped in half. This piston was a simple cylinder with a pin that could have been modeled and then printed on a open source 3D printer like Cupcake CNC or Rep Rap.

Now I just need to get a better understanding of Arduino and 3D modeling before I can seriously justify the cost. But until then, I can keep dreaming.

Back in October 2008, as I was driving my wife held the camera on the cars dashboard. The end result with the video speed up and the music creates a pretty cool effect.

I have been working on a module for physics to visually explain Conics. I choose to use Papervision to construct this learning module in flash.

The first issue I discovered was rough edges when a plane intersected the double-napped cone model. This problem was very obvious when the intersections where at angles that cut into the vertices of the model. This was around the time when the QuadrantRenderEngine class became available with Papervision 2.

So when I finally got back on track with this project, I was pleased to get the new QuadrantRenderEngine to work with the conics module. The plane cut through the model just wonderfully and cleanly. Until I rotated the model and plane to discover the render engine only helped the top side of the plane, not the back side. There underneath the plane was breaking up just like before.

So what to do? I tried 2 separate one-sided planes (opposite facing) and animating them separately, but this result was awful because of the inconsistent animation paths. Tried a cube, but that didn’t seem to work.

Until I finally realized that I could group the two opposite facing planes into an 3D object and animate the object as 1 item. Using the DisplayObject3D class, I was able to group and animate the 2 planes together.

Papervision certainly has its learning curves. But I am starting to figure it out.

I am in the process of finishing up a new website for Alberta Network of Professional & Organizational Development (ANPOD.ca). One of the requirements for the site was to have wiki functionality.

The college isn’t set up to host our own wikis, so I needed to do some research to find a hosted Wiki solution. There were a couple of considerations I had to keep in mind when searching for a wiki solution:

• It had to be FREE
• The Wiki needed to be hosted
• Ability to add custom design
• Private viewing for registered members
• Control on creating and editing the entries

There where a couple of viable options:

• Wikidot
• Wikispaces
• Wikia

I ended up choosing Wikidot because it seemed straight forward and the ability to modify the design to compliment the ANPOD website design.

I won’t get into the particulars about using Wikidot; rather I will offer a handful of tips I have figured out while working with this website tool.

• Design: Keeping in mind that the structure of the wikis is set, however there are a handful of templates already constructed. I recommend extending an existing template and just modifying the CSS. It is easier than building a template from scratch and it allows you to do simple modification to the layout and color scheme.
• Modifying the Navigation: It wasn’t to clear how I could edit the navigation, the trick is to click on “edit this panel”. This will bring the navigation into the main content part of the page and then you can choose the edit button to modify the HTML for the navigation.
• Google Analytics: Under 3rd party tools, you can add your Google Analytics profile key for tracking traffic on your Wiki.
• Accessing Admin: To make changes to a Wiki, you need to go to the admin part of your site. You can access it by clicking on the “Site Manager” link. To get direct access to the site manager, you need to be logged in and add “admin:manage” to your wiki URL.

I am still getting used to this website. But it seems to hold a lot of promise, just not as straight forward as building a website with WordPress or DreamWeaver.