Project Box explorer

I've adapted my "Automated CAD design" system to go a few steps further and have it generate all the data and metadata needed for an interactive website that lets you explore a canned(for now) set of design permutations.

I've got a lot of polish to do on the html itself, but I finally got it to a minimally viable web app.

Check it out: https://anibit.com/box

Stupid Simple Website Metrics

I wrote a tool that I am open-sourcing to keep track of website server performance. It is very un-fancy. It tries to do one job and do it well: Log and display page load times. (Wait, is that two jobs?)

Background

Over the past several months, I've spent way more time than I had anticipated stressing over, testing, and trying to fix the abdominal performance I had on anibit.com. I was using a low end hosting service intended for personal websites, which I had expected to on the slower side of things, but it got so bad that page loads could take up to 45 seconds. That was even at times when I was the only user other than the failed spam-bot log ins once a minute or so. I would have been satisfied with 6 second loads even though that is considered a generally poor user experience. Something had to give. Anibit was on a shared server with probably dozens (my host service doesn't reveal that I'm aware of how many websites share your host). Any of them could misbehave and bring the server to it's knees until the hosting service brought the hammer down on them, which it frequently needed to do.

Followup to my "Automated CAD Design" post.

I received a lot of positive feedback on my last post, and some of the ideas posted on the sites that picked it up gave me the inspiration to write this follow up. There were some good ideas and some questions posed so I thought I'd try to make  few addenda and clarifications.

Choice of toolchain.

I chose OpenSCAD mostly as the first thing that popped into my head. The nightly version (2014.03 as I write), is fairly stable. The output it generated was well received by most of the other tools I used it with, which included Blender3D, for rendering the preview images, MeshLab for debugging the geometry when I goofed something, and LibreCAD for loading the 2D DXF files to send to my laser cutter. I even used Elmer to do some rudimentary(and probably naive) stress sanity checks.

I did lament that some the really cool features in the bleeding edge version of OpenSCAD were not available, but the generated output of the newer version had some erroneous geometry. I've read on the OpenSCAD forums there may be some versions for download that don't have those bugs.

I had worked with OpenSCAD before, so I knew what it's capabilities and limitations were. I wasn't really tied to OpenSCAD, here are some alternative tools work very similarly. Ultimately, it came down to the devil I knew, and that it supported all of the features that were critical to me: easy to setup, mature and stable, bug free STL and DXF output, and allowing me to programmatically override the skeleton designs by emitting generated design code.

Automated CAD design.

[UPDATE: I've written a followup  here]

First, I should get something off my chest, the title is probably a little misleading. "Heavily parameterized 3D case design" might have been a more accurate, but dull title.

I recently kicked off laser cutting services on Anibit, and I plan to augment that service with a lot of specific product designs that I create. I'm a nut for automation and flexibility, and I'm deficient in intrinsic artistic talent. I determined that, as much as possible, I would design the physical aspects of my mechatronics creations in a way that I could easily make changes large and small, and not have to re-do much work.

My first area of focus was an automated heavily parameterized system of scripts for creating laser cut acrylic project cases. This was stupid fun to work on, and my blog post frequency has been anemic this year, so grab some snacks and settle in for a read.

Automatically rendered preview image.

My weapon of choice in this case is OpenSCAD, a text-based parametric modeling program. Don't be intimidated, OpenSCAD is one of the easiest modeling packages I've ever used. Software developers especially will feel right at home: