Shout out to Michael Davis. He read about my BRL-CAD STL problems and suggested I use combinations instead of regions. This largely fixed my STL export issues, and the export is generally much faster. I still have to check that a service bureau can use the STL files produced. Here is a render of the STL output:
You can see the faceting produced by the chosen resolution. Looks like we are back in business with designing and producing Polywell cores.
Still cutting my teeth with sketchup. Here is the hercules extruder in 3D:
The sketchup-svg-outline-plugin is great for producing laser cuts for Ponoko. I recommend this sketch-svg tutorial.
Added the trapped nut cutouts:
This intersect model tutorial was essential for making the trapped nut cutouts.
I just ordered v1 of the extruder from ponoko:
Seeing as I’ll be doing a lot of prototyping, I figured it would be good to have my own rapid prototyper. So I’ve built a reprap, it’s almost finished. This is the ponoko model. Progress so far: 
This iteration of the design is nearly ready for rapid prototyping. The chassis walls are thicker, and there is more room for the coils. Also the joints are hollow now, so the coils can be wired together. Specs:
Here is the corresponding array of 12 lids:
Now we have the completed polywell shape, with connectors:
Now we can export to an STL file, and produce our first physical object (in plastic to begin with).
Further progress towards a working chassis:
this is what it would look like before inserting the coils.
here is a closeup:
Check this out. A truncated dodecahedral Polywell rendered in CAD.
I created this using ruby to pass draw instructions to mged (the main command line tool for BRL-CAD):
require 'matrix'
phi = (1+Math.sqrt(5))/2
icosahedron = Matrix[
[0, +1, +phi],
[0, +1, -phi],
[0, -1, +phi],
[0, -1, -phi],
[+1, +phi, 0],
[+1, -phi, 0],
[-1, +phi, 0],
[-1, -phi, 0],
[+phi, 0, +1],
[+phi, 0, -1],
[-phi, 0, +1],
[-phi, 0, -1]
]
icosahedron.row_vectors().each_with_index do |v,index|
`/usr/brlcad/bin/mged -f -c test3.g 'in torus#{index}.s tor #{v[0]} #{v[1]} #{v[2]} #{v[0]} #{v[1]} #{v[2]} 1.0 0.125'`
end
This basically iterates through the vertices of the icosahedron, and draws a torus normal to the origin. Now we are tantalizingly close to having a CAD file we can render in metal.
First off, I’m all about open source software. Free, unencumbered, agile, fast.
For CAD I’m using BRL-CAD which is based on constructive solid geometry
For glue code I’ll use Ruby or Python. I know ruby I don’t know python.
SAGE for a mathematics package.
I havn’t looked closely at this yet, but here is a list of robots software packages
My laptop is a mac, I use linux on the server side, and will likely use EC2 for cloud computing.
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