Have people had a good look at croquet yet? [www.opencroquet.org]

I have been wondering about its applications to this project, especially in the realms of object creation, visualisation and sharing... Would be really fun to get it to directly drive a repRap for the printing of any suitable object you have access to on local or remote islands...

Hi deadgenome,

... looks very interesting!

It seems to have much bigger potential then Blaxxun's first try, but now it has some more competition in virtual- and simworlds.

You must have a minimum amount of users and common interest for driving it over a time long enough, so i wish the very best ...

Viktor

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/19/2008 01:15AM by Viktor Dirks.

It is currently used (and backed) by Intel for their internal forums, under the guise of Quaq forums [www.qwaq.com] is also beginning to be used militarily for battlefield analysis and is being pushed into schools for use on Promethius whiteboards. Also, the language that it is programmed in is also the language of the default programming environment on the OLPC initiative [laptop.org] so squeak/smalltalk programmers may outnumber all others within 10 years. Sooner or later we should probably port the repRap software to squeak anyway, just to make it more accessable on OLPC machines.

What they have done is concentrate on getting the underlying architecture working and truly scalable on a virtualised and multi-platform system with a complete SDK that can be accessed entirely from within the 3d environment, this is why it still has coder-graphics.

As opposed to the other model of getting something shiny thrown up with cobbled together technologies on an unscalable infrastructure to get some quick cash out of middle-class teenagers, before the entire system crashes under the weight of it's own success and the creators greed.... or Second-Life as it's better known.

... yeah ... i won't name it.

Many years ago i tried to design a scalable virtual constructor-world, where i start with coloured balls resembling single atoms, then stick the balls together in the wished order, a physics-engine adjust the distance and angles to form simple molecules, and so on, and so on ...

When the object gets to big or complicated, i would change the dimension or collapse it to a 'macro' object with some linkage-infos and could progress in ever coarser dimension, until i come 'up' to macroscopic dimensions or some centimetres in size.

It seems with croquet this would be possible without big problems - so maybe a new run?

Viktor

funnily enough, a mate of mine has just built an infinite zoomer using lua - [www.lua.org] - that navigates xml trees... (it apparently took him about three days to learn the language and write the zoomer.... I am trying to get him involved with croquet at the moment cos he's damn quick)

Other reasons to take the Croquet project seriously is it's team - [opencroquet.org] - have a read through and you'll see what I mean. Also, further up the page that I've linked to is some stuff that seems to address your 'scalable virtual constructor-world' thingy.

Hi deadgenome,

... good to know - i'll have a look on this ...

Viktor

Nice reference to Neuromancer deadgnome. My favorite cyberpunk book. Snowcrash being the second and the other Gibson's in that series coming after.

Demented

I have now sent the idea of reprap/croquet integration off to the croquet people, I shall report back anything interesting that comes of it...

-------

*edit* here's the content of the email I sent to the Croquet list -

"I have been thinking about writing some sort of driver to enable
Croquet to control a RepRap - [reprap.org] - or similar open
source 3d printing technology.

The approach that I was thinking would be sensible was to firstly
porting the RepRap control software to squeak (it is currently written
in java) in a form that could be used by non-Croquet systems, such as
the OLPC platform (I assume that the OLPC box is not going to be
powerful enough to run Croquet properly, please tell me if I am wrong
in this assumption).

Next a Croquet application would be created that sends 3d data to be
printed to this generic squeak control software and gets data back
from it on things like the proposed route of the print head, errors
due to non-printable geometry (sealed hollow objects, for instance)
and how the print is progressing.

Also, the Croquet application should have a couple of main ways of
using it. In the first, the print is automated (possibly with a few
options for things like alternate internal structure strategies) and
is left mostly up to the discretion of the control software. In the
second, the control software reports back it's proposed tool route to
the Croquet application in the form of a 3d path, which can then be
manually tweaked in Croquet by more advanced users who want that level
of control.

By creating this software, users would be able to directly print any
object they have access to or have created, which would extend the
concepts of object creation, visualisation and sharing out of the
virtual realm and into the physical.

What do people think of this idea and can they see any major problems
with the approach I am suggesting, or ways of doing it that might be
better?"

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/22/2008 08:47AM by deadgenome.