Blender CAM

Blender CAM is an open source solution for artistic CAM - Computer aided machining needs.

Blender CAM is an extension for the free open-source Blender 3d package.

Features:

•     Several milling strategies for 2D and 3D
•     Cutter types: ball, flat, v-carve with various angles
•     work with 3d data or depth images
•     Layers and skin for roughing.
•     Inverse milling
•     Various options for ambient around model
•     protection of vertical surfaces
•     stay low - option for movement
•     material size setup
•     simulation of 3d operations

Export to:

•     currently exports for mach3.

Link to 'Blender CAM' post

CTRL.SHIFT - Co-de-iT workshop - 2-7 April - Vienna

CTRL.SHIFT – the Control Shift in computational design
Grasshopper + Processing workshop
Vienna, Austria
02-07.04.2013

The workshop explores the manifold relations of creativity and control in computational design. The availability of increasingly complex and sophisticated tools shifts how control and sensibility are exerted and deployed within the design process. A new computational craft is required, one that allows the embedding in computational simulation of matter and agency so that ideas propagate in a deeper ecology with degrees of autonomy that provide complex feedbacks. Objects and systems are not anymore simple assemblages of static parts but are generated from the interrelations of other complex objects within ecologies. The designer is not just merely using tools rather establishing a loop dialogue with their creative and autonomous possibilities: questioning their capacity and extension, evaluating and empathizing with the result that in turn allow configuring and being configured by them continuously.

We will explore matter and agency behaviors through Grasshopper (with Millipede plugin) and Processing, interrogating the aesthetic potential of Topology Optimization and Multi-Agent Systems.

Link to Co-de-iT workshop webpage

Future CNC

Future CNC explores the future of computer numeric controlled (CNC) manufacturing technologies as they proliferate into domestic, commercial, and creative settings. As the cost of CNC machinery rapidly decreases, powerful, precise, and efficient new tools will become available to a much wider audience. Students are invited to speculate and create a vision for how CNC and robotic fabrication techniques will be put to use in the future.

Link to 'Future CNC' website

The Computational Monkeys

Through design applications, research and knowledge transfer, THE COMPUTATIONAL MONKEYS aim to gather, broadcast and produce progressive architectural ideas on the computational condition of our contemporary societies.

I really like this research group because is one of the first that starts to investigate possible Architecture and BCI (Brain Computer Interface) relationships.

Link to 'The Computational Monkeys' website

ArchDaily - interview to Andrew Hessel

The future will pose tremendous challenges to how architecture and cities are conceived, requiring comprehensive and scalable solutions, often found outside of what we traditionally call “architecture”. So after hundreds of interviews with architects that we’ve conducted, we realized that in order to confront these challenges we needed to expand our focus. For the first time, we invited to our office an “architect” of life, Andrew Hessel, co-chair of the Biotechnology and Bioinformatics Program at Singularity University and leader in the field of synthetic biology (the design of life through the use of information technology).

Link to ArchDaily interview webpage

Ladybug - grasshopper plugin

Ladybug is a free and open source environmental plugin for Grasshopper to help designers create an environmentally-conscious architectural design. Ladybug allows you to: import and analyze standard weather data in Grasshopper; draw diagrams like Sun-path, wind-rose, radiation-rose, etc; customize the diagrams in several ways; run radiation analysis, shadow studies, and view analysis for your design inside Grasshopper!

Link to Ladybug

CAMel - grasshopper component for CAM

CAMel is a project to develop Rhino Grasshopper components for CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing). At present the components are just clusters with scripted components written within Grasshopper. The next major step will be to convert this into a proper grasshopper plug-in.
The main components are as follows:

• GCode Writer: Converts lists of points, vectors and feed rates into GCode for the machine.
• GCode Checker: Reads GCode and checks and optimises it. For example a 5-axis machine can usually obtain any tool angle in two different ways. This selects the better angle. It will also give warnings of undesirable behavior in the GCode.
• Surfacing: Creates a toolpath to cut an arbitrary surface (very rough version, designed to test others)
• Swarf cutting: Creates toolpath from information about the movement of the tip of the tool and the point in which the tool enters the surface. For a 5-axis machine these paths can be quite different.

Link to CAMel webpage