Those who know me might be surprised to see me slipping the American English spelling of centre into the title of this post. On the other hand, those who know me and know some computer programming might realise that it is a clue that I’ll be describing something related to writing programs. Even in British English, the American spelling has become baked into the word we use to describe code and there are often cases where such words have to be used inside the code as well: center is a case in point.
The reason I am thinking about it today is the OpenSCAD project I was messing about with yesterday afternoon. I’m trying to create holders from some elegant but thin and narrow-based bottles we have in our kitchen. One of the reasons they look elegant is that the sides aren’t flat but rounded with a wide radius. Unfortunately, that also means any holder needs to be designed with a similar radius. I got that figured out but didn’t account for it in doing the maths to constructed some small demo pieces. As a result, the physical dimensions were not quite what I expected – I’d forgotten to account that I wasn’t in the “Kansas” of straightforward, flat sides any more.
One strategy that seems to be working out is to try and create my base objects centred in the 3D space (with the center attribute set to true). At the cost of a few more calculations in setting some of them up, it makes it easier to then position them in space relative to each other because they all share that reference point. Mind you, the other strategy that I’m also looking at is installing FreeCAD. That interface relies more on visual manipulation and, I am hoping, should also include a measuring tool. OpenSCAD is a powerful tool, which I’ll keep on working with, but sometimes I want to be able to sculpt my designs rather than having to calculate the dimensions and positions of every last divot.