aesthetics, I.T., web development

It’s been a while since I pushed a feature to Mandalagaba worthy of a post.

I just pushed a tool I call “Fibonacci Assist”. It’s meant to help you draw Fibonacci spirals by overlaying the proper framing based on the beginning of your penstroke.

I was reminded of the existence of this sequence and its ties to nature reading the most excellent children book: Swirl by Swirl. The book is simply magnificent and so I thought I’d do my part to help bring into the world more Fibonacci spirals.

I have yet to play with it using a stylus.

3D modeling / printing, aesthetics, I.T., plotters

Well so, I fell into a very deep rabbit hole. The world of pen plotters… A year in, I finally have some good results. After several prototypes of Gondola plotters (V-plotters) and regular tabletop plotters. I’ve homed in on a set of designs, hardware, electronics, and algorithms to think I can make a small difference in that world. I still need to iterate a little but I’m hoping to release each plotter as a DYI projects in 2020. Maybe I’ll even sell my making them for others. Of course there will be integrations with Mandalagaba because that just makes sense.

Now there are several such plotters one can buy or build for a wide range of prices. And they all have a very shitty software stack. This is where I believe I can make the biggest difference.

As with building houses, it’s enormously relieving to finally see into the real world a model you’ve been immersed in, CADing it for a year.

I’ll skip talking about the long series of challenges I ran into building this. It’s really, really nice to see a long plot finished to perfection knowing that finally, nothing is wrong. I’ve learned a lot along the way.

There’s a bazillion pen plotters on Thingiverse, I’ve used some of them as stepping stones until I was ready to finally make my own top to bottom. As I said, software is where I think I can make the biggest difference. I’m a Raspberry Pi aficionado, and this opens the door to a sophisticated software stack (web servers, HTML canvasses, format conversion, penstroke optimization, live link with Mandalagaba). I found not a single plotter using a Pi, in fact I found very few projects of anything using stepper motors with a Pi. I had to do some serious trail blazing to step a motor reliably.

Here is for example a pen stroke optimization algorithm I developed to speed up plotting.

 

The base, drawing penstrokes as they come. “Empty” travel going from one penstroke to the next without the pen drawing: ~36437 (relative pixels).

The next penstrokes is the closest. Empty travel ~15820, 0.43 compression ratio.

The next penstrokes is the closest, but consider its beginning as well as its end, draw the penstroke reversed if it was the end which was closest. Empty travel ~12467, 0.34 compression ratio.

 

Now for the eye candy 🙂

I could watch this for hours, and I did.

Of course the efficacy of this algorithm depends heavily on the model to be drawn. I found that anything coming from Mandalagaba tends to benefit enormously, especially tessellations. And it makes sense, for every penstroke drawn, the repetitions occur throughout the canvas and they show up in that order even if you drew in a very localized area. The example above comes from the most excellent turtletoy.net.

More to come very soon on the great world of plotters…

self sustainability, wood

This is unfortunately not an improvement from my last attempt. The design is barely visible due to my poor choice of facing bark. Still, I’m trying to get better at this every year.

building, self sustainability

So far in building, I’ve been happy to contract out roofing to otherwise more capable people with better tools. It’s always notoriously difficult to get contractors to show up, roofers even more. And I get it, no one wants to do their work and so they have even more leverage than most contractors. They don’t care what your building schedule looks like, they only care to have work lined up on their own schedule and will say anything to keep it that way. Their incentive is to keep you waiting so you’re available for them when they have a gap. This year I had it waiting for them and getting strung along, I couldn’t afford it any longer with Winter right around the corner so I went ahead with my usual “screw it, I’ll just do it myself”.

All in all it’s not very difficult but there are a few tricks to pick up, and it is definitely physically hard and fairly dangerous.

I was quoted $2800 for this roof, it ended up costing $1100 and I spent an extra $200 on metal cutting tool I didn’t have, and $250 on climbing gear to be safer and because I want to climb trees for fun. It also “cost” me 2 and a half days of work. I can’t say I’m sad I had to do it myself for the savings and tools I got. The real silver lining though, is that I’ll never have to call a roofer ever again. I now possess the knowledge and the tools. Now that, is a freeing feeling :).

After this, I finally got to proceed with the siding which was long overdue. My dad who is the worst handyman I know (I learned all my swear words watching him with a hammer), came out and helped. I was very apprehensive going in, one of the unspoken worries of homesteading is when people of little manual ability decide they too want to have a homesteading experience and offer their help. He ended up doing really great and helped a lot. Agnes stained a whole bunch of boards, both saved me a lot of time in one day.

I laid shiplap diagonally for strength, we get high winds and this shed has 12′ walls to catch them with. I was ok compromising aesthetics for strength. It turns out it looks really good. We’re very pleased with the result.

I put the roof on right before a big rain, and I sided 1 wall right before a big wind. Right on time, not waiting for the roofers was the right decision, I could have been in trouble if I had: more water ruining the frame, the wind catching in the big sail that is the roof without any structural strength against shearing.

Previously I could hear the building move on little wind gusts, with only 1 wall sided with diagonal boards though, I did not hear a peep during strong gusts. Diagonal is the way :).

I’ll be pushing hard in the next few week ends to close it all up. There is a lot of work left and it really needs to be done before the snow invites itself to Vermont.

 

apple, self sustainability

Rebel without a cause, but with a bin full of apples

Hisse et oh

Using refined cane sugar is not an option

And now we wait

building, self sustainability

I mentioned before the 2 things I enjoy most when building are discovering newly framed windows views, and seeing the outline of a building in the land.

I’ve been taking it at a reasonable pace building this sugarhouse, 4 hours here and there. It’s nice to not build until exhaustion. In some ways I’m slowing down from the frenetic pace of the past few years. I can’t keep working with a barbecue going and 2 kids jumping on the trampoline, signs of how nice life is becoming on our land. Let the good times roll.

 

self sustainability, wood

We acquired a gas powered log splitter. It’s not something that creeped up on us overtime, we never once considered it. In fact we helped a neighbor use one a while back and it very much turned us off. The work was noisy and repetitive.

Then a monstrous maple tree showed up, and even though I bucked it up in short logs to make maul splitting easier, the amount of work it took to get even a crack in it was just too much. We need wood now, and we occasionally get impossible knotted logs, it would be nice to be able to produce larger quantities of wood faster given our increase use with sugaring, and extended stove season much beyond cold weather for cooking and water. All of a sudden it simply made sense, but the decision was hard and I sincerely hope it won’t affect our family maul swinging tradition much.

After using it once, it is indeed nice to see super tough logs pop open with no effort, but I took no satisfaction in the work and this was reassuring in a way.

self sustainability

Our land is really starting to look up this year. We’re steadily pursuing various improvement projects as we expand the range of our management.

Rock harvest

He’s really good at backhoeing, and he absolutely loves it.

We’ll need a rain or 2 before final adjustments

self sustainability, wood

A great gift from our neighbors, they had it felled by professionals as it was menacing their house. All I had to to was show up and buck it up, which still took a full day.  Several limbs were the same size of the full trees I usually go after. I had to move the main trunk logs with the tractor, splitting them will be a whole other matter.

building, self sustainability

A sugarhouse / tool shed / tractor garage / soap making shop, is being born. We’ve had many projects lacking dry space. I’m barely documenting anything, I also have to post some pictures of how incredible the garden is this year. This has all become less than extraordinary: growing awesome gardens, putting together buildings is simply what we do now. A sign of the completeness of the transformation we undertook 8 years ago. In a lot of ways we feel like we don’t need to achieve anything anymore while looking ahead to several large projects for the coming years. Maybe all we had to achieve was making this who we are, everything else follows naturally without fuss.

3 pillars which will be buried to support the lean-to part of the building

Site prep day, truck got stuck

Concrete pouring day, I’ll skip the stresses of dealing with contractors

12′ walls are no joke

He can help more and more but it’s still hard to have him around the site for all the dangers

Not the most conventional framing method but the computer model says it’ll work and I’ve grown accustomed to not questioning what the computer says. I braced the building because there won’t be shearing rated sheathing on the walls and we do get high winds. The roof line will be broken by a sizeable cupola. 20′ rafters also are no joke.

Starting to look good 🙂

apiculture, self sustainability

at least for the next few years, until we could shield the hives better during the long winters. We were going to put things on hold until we had a shed or a greenhouse to move hives in. I have to say beekeeping as fascinating as it was is extremely disappointing especially when compared to doing maple syrup. The way we keep bees in the West seems to be full of human dependence. Fumigating with chemicals, feeding refined sugar, neither of which is exactly local or sustainable.

Through the past couple of years I’ve wondered if some bugs would find residence in the hives which have been sitting empty outside.

Today as Nicole & the kids were in the yard, they had the privilege to witness a swarm of bees descend on one of the hives. A swarm sitting in a tree is impressive as it is, a swarm in motion is really something. Everything was buzzing around everywhere around the house.

It’s really quite a spectacle and we feel like we’ve just received a gift from Nature. Or gift from a beekeeping neighbor 🙂 hard to tell.

It’s kind of mind blowing to think of a swarm having a several miles radius to look for a new house, to pick our land, and specifically our hive. It really gets you thinking about the how smart the bees really are. They sent scouts everywhere, found an obviously good house (literally built for them), and somehow it won the popular vote through frenetic dancing. How amazing is this? Pretty fucking amazing if you ask me.

So here we are, bees in our hive, it’s a real pleasure to go see them. They’re already super busy coming in and out of the hive incessantly. We’ll give them a couple of days to acclimate, and we’ll see what we do next.

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