garageFab.cc

Vincent Rouilly from OpenWetWare.org is using Contraptor plotter to build an open source robot for microbiology lab. Needless to say, I am pretty excited about this! We've been exchanging emails, modding Arduino GCode Interpreter and figuring out how to drive a plotter head with a cheap servo. He made a great suggestion to use different colors for different components in Sketchup files. Up till now, the 3D model of a contraption would be pretty much required to look at during assembly. With components in color, assembly from Sketchup screenshots (or printed pages) is a whole lot easier.

I've been using Sketchup a lot lately. It's such a great tool, and the best thing is that you can go from total noob to being productive literally in a matter of several hours and a couple of tutorial videos. It may not be as powerful but for many modeling tasks, it kills advanced 3D modeling/CAD packages in the learning curve department. And, with an open API, scripts and plugins, you can do some pretty powerful things.

Anyway, every now and then I need to create rounded corners in a rectangle or square. I use the free version and apparently rounded rectangle tool is not available in it, so I threw together a little Ruby script (attached) that turns ordinary rectangle into rounded rectangle with given corner radius. Ideally, you would use the mouse to define radius from one of the rectangle vertices, but so far it just asks you to enter the radius manually. Kinda ugh, but still better than rounding every corner individually. Oh and it only works on rectangular faces with 4 edges, at least for now (some edges can be split).