For making 60-degree dovetails, and R=2mm rounded edges.

This is the top plate of the wedge which will be tilted so that the alt/az mount which is bolted to it has its azimuth axis pointing towards the celestial north pole. The side-plates will have to wait until next weekend.

I’m building an equatorial wedge which will transform my new alt/az goto-mount into an equatorial mount. This is the first part which attaches to the tripod. Two smaller side plates will be bolted to this plate and support a similarly shaped tilted plate to which the alt/az head attaches. The design is similar to the [...]

By popular demand, an example where a PyVCP jogwheel is hooked up to AXIS: The files needed to make this work are in here: axis_jogwheel.tar

The basic operation when producing waterline-paths is to push the cutter along either the X or Y axis (red and green arrows) into contact with a triangle (cyan lines). That’s done through three different functions, one each for the vertices, facet, and edges of the triangle. The vertex test (results shown as red dots) and [...]

Update: this figure shows the numbering of vertices(red), edges(green), and faces(blue). The arrows show the direction of the X-(red), Y-(green), and Z-axes(blue). Here the sides of the cube are not generated with Marching-Cubes, they are just extracted directly from the octree. Nodes are subdivided whenever the signed distance-field of the cutter indicates that the surface [...]

CNC-milled three hemispherical (ca 50mm diameter) holes into these bits of plastic yesterday. To fit a steel cup (far left), attached by gluing.

The speed of the new cutting-simulation code makes it possible to run it at a higher resolution than before. That makes the surfaces look smooth and nice. Alas, some problems still remain with holes in the fabric of reality mystically appearing and disappearing . There is an edge-flipping paper by Kobbelt et al. from 2001 which improves [...]

This is my second attempt at a machining simulation where a moving milling tool cuts away voxels from the stock material. To save space an octree data structure is used to store the voxels, and to produce a nice looking surface you store the signed distance to the exact surface in each vertex of the [...]