Engineering Grafx and whatever is on Dave's mind
Blender is a great piece of software just for fooling around with graphics. I did this yesterday in an hour or so. Most of the stuff is just for understanding a concept or two. Once and a while is is just fun to cobble together something just to check my progress with the software.
I have a couple small lasers. I have some really cool software. I’m gonna live it up and just start developing things and see where it all goes.
Here is the 1st mess of 2024. I hope to post a lot more here this year.
There is a new machine in the stable. I really though it was going to be more of a toy than anything else. It turns out to be better than expected. Linux is now in the mix running Lightburn and connecting to the control. Its my first Linux CNC.
Assembling it was fairly straight forward. It started right up and ran a built in demo program built into the controller. I continue to be amazed at what has become available at a price point that allows for entry into the fabrication and marking business.
Yesterday I ran my first simple program and accidentally almost cut through the board. It was a pleasant discovery. These things really can cut through wood at a pretty reasonable clip. The smoke generated by it was a bit of a surprise. You don’t really want to fire this thing up in your dining room which of coarse I’m doing. It needs to be in a shop. I’ll probably have to enclose it and put some kind of ventilation on it.
Its been a few months now since I started putting my ideas together and working toward the goal of making a little shop. I am now familiar with several different pieces of software. There is now a machine that can be put to work. It should lead to faster development since now it is possible to be making something while tinkering with other things.
Now it is time to start coming up with product and marketing it. Hopefully with luck I’ll find a niche and be able to make a modest living marking and and fabricating small parts.
This old app has been running for some time. I thought I’d pull it up front and start to develop on it. Here is to the new and improved Engraf
I wrote this and put in on linkedin on September of 2017. I have been thinking about this lately. I am surrounded by people that just don’t get “IT”. I still like this one it was fun to write.
If such a thing as an amateur computer scientist exists it is something that I would like to thought of as. Only on one occasion has it been my “job” it made me crazy. So for most of my life my “job” has been in some shape or form related to engineering and manufacturing. Don’t get me wrong my skill with computers is my vocation but, frankly from a theoretical sense what computers are used for in engineering is pretty boring. I have a great deal of fun writing about little gizmos that can be had for a pittance and how powerful they are for the buck. I do however and always have had a real penchant for turbo belchfire scorching brute force computer power. I still have a few of my hand made carefully specified workstations and would not personally use a machine I didn’t build.
Once upon a time the biggest baddest fire breathing beasts were used for CAD. Today it can be comfortably done on a mid ranged system as long as you aren’t trying to model complex things. My last cad station was a dual Xeon 3 Ghz machine with a Nvidia 3800 in it. A respectable machine no doubt. In fact I have three of them. I’d like to get several more before too long. I’ll get into that later. I bring it up because when I did a 240 room nine story barracks on it things got real creaky. In fact I could only do one floor per drawing because things just got a bit too laggy. I started drawing just because it gave me access to good gear and more significantly much cooler computer systems.
The first version of AutoCAD I used was release 9. It was the second release of the software. Why it was called 9 you will have to take that up with Autodesk. It came with like a dozen manuals. All of which I read cover to cover, some several times. It is during this time several very cool computer concepts came into focus. First and foremost is the idea of vector versus raster graphics. It may not be common knowledge but ACAD was always a 3-D system. It even included the standard primitives minus the Utah teapot. So while the less informed may have thought I was sitting in the corner drawing and learning how to design control systems my agenda was quite different, I was discovering procedural vector graphics organized into a database which parsed and projected vector data onto a two dimensional plane and displayed on a raster screen.
Graphics have always been my thing. Back when I was surreptitiously advancing my personal interests while appearing to do stuff engineers thought was useful I was also discovering fractals by reading a book by James Gleick called “Chaos the making of a new science”. A book I recently discovered a fellow by the name of Loren Carpenter also read and credited with the inspiration of his co-development of the Reyes renderer and eventually RenderMan which led to him being a co founder of Pixar, A very cool thing because the book had a big impact on me and, apparently I’m not alone. Anyway one of the key concepts in the book is a thing called the Mandelbrot set. I wont go into it other than to mention a 30 line piece of basic code took 90 hours to render on my 2 Mhz graphics computer a pretty state of the art computer back in 1980’s. I was hooked on procedural graphics from that point on.
Computer graphics is a vast subject. The mechanical means by which they are projected onto a flat surface is fascinating. It involves vast memory pools, interpolation algorithms and zillions of arithmetical calculations. A simple 1080p video display consists of 2,073,600 pixels. So every image displayed must at the very least require a data stream of over two million data points. A standard refresh rate for a display is 60 Hz. So multiply ~2×10 to the 6th x 60 and you get a very big number all of this occurs 60 times per second. Now color depth is another matter a standard “true color” is 24 bits or 3 bytes per pixel so the amount of memory is 3 bytes per pixel so an image or frame requires just under a gigabyte of raw data. Now of coarse while you are displaying one image you are buffering the next one in the background so double your practical memory need. With all that is it involved it is easy to understand why a processor capable of three billion operations per second can get bogged down to a crawl rather quickly when playing with graphics. This is only a cursory look at the mechanics its not even starting to get fun yet. It is important because most people hit the on button and it just magically works. Script kiddies just wanna be creative geniuses and have no basic understanding of the underlying task.
Okay, now lets talk about vector or procedural graphics. I was using them long before I actually understood what they are. A vector is a geometrical concept used to describe a line segment. By definition it has an origin, direction, and magnitude simple as that. Now if you create 3 vectors with 3 vertices you have a triangle, the most basic form of surface you can create. Any other shape including quadrilaterals consist of combining triangles. Many times in 3-D parlance the shapes are just referred to as polygons. A cool thing to do besides draw pictures of a porch you want to build is to orient polygons in a theoretical “space” set up a point of view shoot theoretical rays not dissimilar to radar and use that information to project the result onto a flat plane and plot it. This is CAD. Go a step further and paste a theoretical surface on the polygon and texture it either procedurally with a bitmap (read raster image) and now you can create things that appear to be “real”. Go a little farther and add characteristics such as mass and then you can do procedural simulation. A little beyond my current depth but, I have toyed with physics engines and do intend to delve into them once my mastery of this topic is closer to complete. I could go on about Rend386 and POVray a couple of open sourced programs developed in the mid eighties, they are worth mentioning here because it was my first experience with these concepts and provided a base for my current understanding of the computer science of generating graphics.
In computer science there is a concept called embarrassingly parallel. Very few things meet this criteria but, rendering polygons is one of them. Years ago I got sick and tired of flat boring monochrome line drawings. I had literally drawn thousands of them. I decided to concentrate on 3-D. So then Engraf was created to pursue this goal. Back in ’02 mid range boxes were sporting 1 Ghz processors and if you look into it you will discover it takes very little geometry to bog down the frame rendering rate to a crawl. However if you use two machines it takes half the time, four would half that time again and in theory you could continue to half the time off into infinity. Alas though the exponential nature of the power of two gets cruel and expensive rather quickly. So Engraf never really left the developmental stages.
Since then multi processor multi core systems have become more affordable. So now the key element is coming down to the human element. while still not cheap is the human capital that is now the real expensive element. For the past ten years all I have done is model 3-D. Of coarse someone paid me to do it because while my agenda was in the background in the foreground was helping someone make money and meet their payroll. I like win win and don’t subscribe to the concept of zero net gain. Of coarse now they got these cool scanners that create point clouds but, that is a whole other graphics topic for some other time. So yeah, I CAD but probably not how you think even, if you CAD too.
I have mentioned linux quite a bit in pretty much anything I write about computers. This is because when it comes to operating system there really is nothing to compete with it. Looking at my resume it is easy to conclude most of my career has been spent drawing with CAD and running windows based systems. I do have extensive experience and knowledge of the “Wintel” platform. It is designed for and used predominantly with personal computers. It is however not a good choice for studying and learning about computers as a technology in and of itself. If you know me you are aware my first passion on life is computers. A word that is thrown around quite a bit, its meaning to me though is the actual electronic device(s) not their application or end use.
Linux is at its very core a network operating system based on principals derived from Unix. Back in the days when computer were categorized as Micro, Mini, and Mainframes one of the major distinguishing factors was the operating system the machine ran. The Mini & Mainframe domains ran a version of Unix. The reason for this was, this architecture was, Unix was a time sharing system with provisions for users, permissions, and priority as well as interconnectivity between systems. This made them suitable for large organizations with multiple users all working on the same “system”. Micro computers were designed for the use of one user. As time went on and processors became more powerful and less expensive the lines began to blur.
When Linix was first developed its purpose was really as a learning exercise by a college student. He had the vision to release the source code through a licensing scheme known as the GPL (General Public License). At the time there were many Unix utilities also available with the same licensing agreement. This included pretty much all of the Unix tools being used by proprietary systems. A major factor was this tool set included a “C” compiler. It was not long until all of this was running on the Linux kernel and linux distributions started to appear.
This was around 1993 or so. The first linux distribution I managed to get installed and running was/is called Slackware. It was an ordeal since it was on floppy disks. I don’t remember what specific version it was but, I do remember at the time my CD-ROM drive was a slot mounted single speed deal. I have been hooked on linux ever since. I have installed and configured linux hundreds of times since then. Exploring distributions has been a long term hobby. The major ones are: Slackware, Red Hat (until it became proprietary, Suse, Debian, Mandriva (now obsolete) and most recently Kali, Cent OS, Mint, Ubuntu, Noobs (Raspberry Pi) and Knoppix. These days I tend to hover around using Debian based distributions because the package manager is so mature and refined it really saves a lot of work getting a system up and running the services needed.
What Linux provides once it is up and running can provide a multitude of services and applications. Applications are a straight forward thing most people only use a few and this is the extent of their exposure to computers. A basic list of these apps would include; a word processor, spread sheet, e-mail, web browser, contacts, and calendar this pretty much covers 90 percent of most user’s needs. There are also Power Apps used by more advanced end users such as accounting, CAD, commercial graphics packages, and databases. My role in business has been mostly in the CAD role. This is because work was readily available and paid well enough. Studying how technology works is my real passion. A linux server can be set up to provide all of the back end network functions to support any or all of the above described users. It can also be infrastructure. Providing Web Server Services, Database Server, Domain Name Services, E-mail, Samba Server, CUPS, X, and pretty much anything else you can name or need.
The nice thing about linux is you can have as much or as little as you want. It plays nicely with other computers even windows and apple machines. It is highly scalable. It is in active and ongoing development and has a huge user base of skilled users.
Well its a new year. Hopefully it will be a good one. Initially the point of hanging this wordpress app on the back door of my website was just to see if it would run. I does so, I played with it some. Now days the desire to sit down and write something has become more frequent.
Writing like other forms of expression can be just that a form of expression. Something is there and it needs to be written down. If not then it is just lost. Nothing is really that important and if it has any real significance its only to the author. So instead of spamming social media I think I’ll just make a habit of logging in here and noodle out my thoughts here. No real purpose no specific topic and of coarse no real audience.
Back in 2002 I became so tired of mundane 2-D flat drafting it was necessary to stop. Since then I have spent over 10 years modeling buildings and developing 3-D skills. I have recently relocated and find myself contemplating what to do.
Truth be told most of the time working on buildings was really just a means to an end. My real passion is making things. Manufacturing and Fabrication is really what gives me real satisfaction. The best times of my life were spent in shops and out on factory floors creating things from piles of parts. Initially hands on and as time went on drawing and designing things. In Virginia there was very little manufacturing but, lots of large scale construction thus the switch. I did pursue manufacturing when possible. Now that I’m located in North Carolina manufacturing is again the biggest thing in town.
My ultimate goal is to build a little fabrication and precision engraving company and providing support services for others who are pursuing similar goals. So now its time to reinvigorate and rework and idea that was before its time but, a good one, one I still believe in.