I need help

I would love to see someone with skill build a grasshopper program for a simple box to be cut on the laser. I have attached a file of a sample. Ideally the grasshopper program would have sliders for the box size (height, width, and depth) and then another slider for thickness of material. If you open the file I've attached you'll see what I mean. It could possible even have a slider for size of finger joints.

This summer I'm doing a workshop where I'll be showing how to do this the hard way--one line at a time. When we're done I could then demo Grasshopper. I do not have the skill to even start designing this in Grasshopper myself. Any takers?

Attachments:

Box.3dm, 1.4 MB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on May 27, 2011 at 1:37pm

Just sit back, put your feet up, eat some popcorn and relax. Let everyone else do the hard work. I know your sort.

But as I couldn't resist:

This needs some work to make it variable for height, width, thickness and number of teeth etc. but as a proof of concept it works ok.

Attachments:

BoxUnFold.avi, 5.5 MB
UnfoldBox.ghx, 1.3 MB

Permalink Reply by Doug Stuivenga on May 27, 2011 at 3:55pm

Looks nice!

The file I attached was an open box rather than a SOMA cube. I thought that would be more useful. I don't have grasshopper here so I'll have to wait until next week to look at what you've done with the programming.

Permalink Reply by Doug Stuivenga on June 1, 2011 at 8:26am

What we need is a program that controls box thickness and size or at least tab depth. Your program is clever but assembling the box could be done in Bongo.

Permalink Reply by Chris Tietjen on June 1, 2011 at 9:25pm

Doug,

I didn't look at your file but here's my take on what you're asking for from your initial post. If necessary I can add a slider to control the separation of the parts. It may not be a problem if your stock is thin enough.

Chris

Attachments:

FingerJointBox.ghx, 748 KB

Permalink Reply by Chris Tietjen on June 2, 2011 at 5:59am

I added a slider to control the part separation.

Chris

Attachments:

FingerJointBox.ghx, 755 KB

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on June 2, 2011 at 7:43am

Ok I think I've reworked to allow for variables. Because of the intersecting geometry you have to be careful with the dimensions in order to get it all correct. So I have given you the ability to specify an approximate size and then the definition works with a multiple of the material thickness so that all the finger joints are uniform.

Attachments:

BoxUnfold_variable.ghx, 1.3 MB

Permalink Reply by Andres Gonzalez on June 2, 2011 at 9:56am

Nice tutorial!

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on June 2, 2011 at 10:23am

It's not really a tutorial, but I have now updated it with annotations so you can follow the process easier.

EDIT: From this I could easily do a tutorial if required as it's broken down in to manageable chunks and uses an "interesting" array of list management techniques.

Attachments:

BoxUnfold_variable.ghx, 1.5 MB

Permalink Reply by taz on June 2, 2011 at 5:42pm

Danny,

Can you spell out the advantage of using compound transformations? I haven't used them much myself...

Thanks,

taz

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on June 3, 2011 at 3:01am

Hi Taz,

To be honest it just seemed like the next logical step. I had already created the last move transformation so to repeat it made sense. I suppose it could have just as easily been the last vector of the previous move with a new move component.

There is no speed advantage, none that I can see on the profiler anyway.

I think in this case there is no advantage. I think it becomes more advantageous when using Grasshopper Groups. i.e. you create a "module" of lots of geometry and you need to perform several transformations on them, eg move then rotate. If you don't use groups and transformations then the move will be applied to the first geometry in the module and rotate to the rest because of the data matching.

Permalink Reply by taz on June 3, 2011 at 10:32am

Ah yes, I forgot that groups and compound transforms go together... They came into being at the same time.

Thanks

Permalink Reply by Alex Morgan on June 2, 2011 at 7:28pm

Nice Work Danny, I've been very interested in creating furniture using this method, if you have time to produce a tutorial that would be very nice as I am still learning this tool too. Thanks Alex. :-)