Engineer Zero

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Finally, a tea cup that can keep the bag and string from hitting your nose. A gee-gaw to be 3D printed, except ABS plastic melts at 180 F so you can’t use Makerbot on this one. Gee-gaw, strange word. Gee-gaw. Something a crow would say.

You might wonder what this thing is, if the title of this entry didn’t give it away.

Anyhow, I went to the Google Warehouse and downloaded a spoon, then inserted it into the model. Like so:

The basic idea is, you don’t want your wetted spoon to touch the table because that would be germy. So you insert it into a spoonholder, which through the power of what I like to call “Archimedean Static Leverage” prevents the spoon from touching the table. Now, you might be saying, “Why don’t I just put the spoon on a saucer or a plate?” Well, you could say that.

If you want one of these, they’re only $39.95 plus postage. The reason for the price is because I really don’t want to make one, so I’ll charge so much that only an idiot would want to buy one. I was thinking, though, that someday I’ll figure out how to make a 3D printable file for this, and then it might be fun for people to make their own. Unlike saucers, by the way, the spoonholder never has to be washed. So maybe it’s not so silly, after all, huh?

And just in case you’re wondering what it would be like, here’s a spoonholder in a restaurant on Mars:

I have a New Yorker cartoon calendar, and today’s cartoon features a doghouse that looks like a human house. Anyhow, I was inspired to duplicate the house in Sketchup, and this is what it looks like:

The gables and roof are components, which really does make it a lot easier to draw things. I was wondering how the gables would turn out when they intersected the roof, but that’s what Intersect with Model is for. So I learned how to do that. Unfortunately, I learned how to do that before I made a roof component with overhangs, so I had to redo Intersect with Model. Or rather, I redid it for the far right gable, then I thought, “What the heck, it’s not professional work.” So I didn’t redo IwM for the other gables, and you can tell if you look closely at how their roofs intersect with the house roof. Which actually is kind of instructive. One of those cases where being lazy and incomplete is actually the right thing to do. Like not rewriting the previous sentence to be less grammatically ambiguous.

The gables were white in the cartoon. I have since changed them to black in the file, but refrained from uploading. If the cartoonist is lazy, who am I to disagree?

I was watching a History Channel documentary on The Brain just now. Toward the end it mentioned a new technology being developed, which enables a human to spot objects in photographs many times faster than normal. It’s being developed by DARPA, so the announcer said, “But the applications could go far beyond defense and intelligence.”

Yeah, you know, like spotting trends in the stock market. Yep, that was it. Spotting trends in the stock market. Isn’t that something to look forward to? Wall Street will now be able to engage in zero sum game speculation go broke and ask for bailouts a thousand times faster than ever before.

That’s something we need.

For some reason, or rather the reason of not thinking about it, I chose the cloudy-transparency option for the windows. So this morning I was looking at it and realized that I should have had just regular old transparent blue. So I opened up the file, opened up the component, and changed the color of the window. Automatically, all the windows are changed. Horay.

By the way, is it just me, or has Family Guy become unwatchable?

Okay, the simple solution to the window-cut problem was to make a wall panel component with the window pre-cut into it. I made the window transparent, by the way. Then I deleted the old walls and replaced them with instances of the panel-window component.

Then to make it interesting, I inserted a background from one of the Mars rover missions.

I know that a restaurant on Mars seems like something for the twenty-second century, if ever, but if we could ever develop some sort of fusion propulsion, this scene could be for real within five years. How about reservations for 9AM breakfast, October 19, 2015?

I realize Chez Mars is kind of generic for the restaurant name, but I downloaded the picture from a Yahoo search and it didn’t give me any information as to where the scene is from. I suppose I could look it up, but we have a few years yet. Another Sunday, then.

As I wallow through Google Sketchup 7 for Dummies, I have tried to apply my knowledge. Here is an attempt to emulate the drawing of a restarant in the book, by using components. I learned that I didn’t know how to make automatic cuts for windows, hence I had to change the window component from transparent to sky(ish) blue. I also discovered I didn’t know how to add the flower vase to the table-chair component without creating a new table-chair component. I think I recall reading that there’s a way to do that, so I shall live and learn another day.

Anyhow, I do appreciate sketchup’s power to create so much detail through component replication. I realize this is hardly professional work here, but it’s more than I thought I could do. And how much farther would I have to go in order to make it professional? Well, make things conform to measurements, spend a little more time designing the chairs and table, add trim to the walls, maybe put in a photo texture wall paneling and floor. If I had hours, I could do it. And if I wanted to do this for a living, I would think about putting together a portfolio of such.

I got this design from the Phineas and Ferb episode, “Brain Drain.” The control pad is seen after 2:00.

My number one goal with Phineas and Ferb, however, is to do their house. But that’s going to take some work.

Or, as the case may be, lack thereof:

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Here’s a design for a remote-controlled robot to perform tasks in space. I’m proud of the level of detail although the proportions, as usual, are a bit off. Hey, it’s called sketchup, not formalpresentationup or productiondrawingup.

I think the arms need to be articulated with another joint. Then again, humans manage okay with just one elbow per arm, so what does my robot have to complain about?

Many years ago I commissioned a drawing of a space tug from a professional graphics artist and he charged me eight hundred dollars for something less detailed than this. Also, for a professional, he was decidedly unprofessional, but that’s another story. Anyhow, doing the graphics these days by myself is more fun, more rewarding, and less expensive. Now if only I had some good rendering software . . . .