Mihai Pruna's Blog – January 2014 Archive (11)

From OpenFOAM to Paraview to get the mesh to Rhino/GH for thickening to NetFabb and Meshlab for preparation.

http://www.shapeways.com/model/1647849/meshed-airfoil-pendant.html?li=shop-results&materialId=83

http://nodebox.net/

From what I have seen so far, the generative part works only in 2D.

3d Modeling:

FreeCad - even though it can seem clunky at first, I prefer it to Autodesk123D.

STL generation, repair and editing:

NetFabb (free version) and MeshLab. Both have their strengths and complement each other.

Meshing (3D)

GMSH: relatively easy to generate a volumetric mesh inside a surface or around it with another surface of primitive as a domain.

Read more about how I use these tools here:…

I've been learning NetGen (an open source mesh generator) and NgSolve (finite element libraries closely linked to Netgen).There is still a lot to cover, I've just started. So far I've gotten them to work in a VC++ project. Well, ngsolve is acting weird, spewing out garbage characters on screen. But at leats it doesn't crash :)

Anyway, I got an idea.

Both…

This open source sandbox type software would probably work well with Grasshopper and Kangaroo!

I used Golems to model robots for a First Technical Challenge competition.

Thank you,

Mihai Pruna

This article will take you through the steps necessary to create and deploy a simple Java game that can be played online.

Using the mouse you will move a white dot around a window, while a black dot will be chasing you. If the black dot gets near you, the game is over. The score is displayed and then the game resets.

To create this game we will use Processing, a developing environment that can generate Java…

This blog will show how I create a program. I tried to put down the thought process as I wrote the code.

Scilab is a free scientific programming language / IDE / toolbox similar to Matlab. But free!

This Scilab program will calculate the shear forces distributed to a fastener pattern by a load in the same plan as the fasteners, but whose location can be…

Grasshopper has a great Delaunay/Voronoi tool. At some point, however, I felt like really understanding the algorithm and set out to make my own. The only thing I took in consideration was the basic principle of Delaunay triangulation, namely, as Wikipedia puts it: "a Delaunay triangulation for a set P of points in a plane is a triangulation DT(P) such that no point…

One of the neatest tricks for avoiding unnecessary 'for' or 'while' loops in your program is using a function recursively.

Engineers and Scientists without a computer science background usually rely on simple iterative techniques in their codes. But sometimes we end up with a bunch of nested loops that make the program very slow in execution and cumbersome to debug. Using recursion is an…

Using Netfabb, Meshlab, FreeCAD, Sumo and ParaView, I created some 3D Printable models, available here:

Mihai Pruna Shapeways store

On the page below I listed several tips of connecting CAD programs using freeware tools:

Mihai Pruna's Interoperability Page