I am inordinately pleased with this. Actually chortling over here before setting up the robot with the spinning blade to cut it out later this week hopefully, weather permitting. My robot minion will make me shelves!
EDIT: Stable version here: to get it to look like the one in the picture set the VertNumber to 1 or 2.
https://abundance.maslowcnc.com/run/wouldchuckit/CurvedSupportBookshelfMultipleVerticals
So for parametric designs it would be useful to be able to have chunks of design appear as you make a section longer and automatically adjust their size to the size of the entire project. I got that to work in this project. I am fairly certain other people out in the greater world have already figured this out but I am pleased to make it work here.
Abundance can do modulo math, rounding, and less than and greater than statements. These suggest other ways to get it to work too.
For true/false equations it outputs a 1 or a 0. This can be used to multiply times another equation to turn it on or off.
In this design I made a one shelf modular unit.
and then made an index to count up.
Which then multiplies times the height of the unit to move and spread a stack of shelves which are all sitting in the same space at the bottom out along the height of the intended shelf. When the index is greater than the number of desired shelves i<=n just returns 0 which multiplies to make the movement 0 .
This would work for anything that we wanted to space out along a path. The only downside to doing it this way is that one needs to have a stack of dummy ones all ready to go in the same space in order to be moved out to be used.
I could probably turn this into a “stack n things” up to 20 or something molecule. Maybe that next time.
To finish it off, I had tagged the back and sides and shelves with a TAG inside the original shape so I could extract and fuse them together at the end.
EXTRACT things tagged with Side
Then FUSE
So those are the shapes that I will cut.
I didn’t do any dog bones so I will have to file the corners of all of the interlocking bits to make them fit.
Other learning:
I made a fancy curve out of two tangent circles to make this and it didn’t like that at all at the point where the circles joined or the point where the curve approached zero width.
I fixed it by adding a tiny circle to cover the point where the the two curves met and a thin rectangle to pad out the width of the narrow point. I don’t know if it will affect things later. The cut layout didn’t work for the assembled project, it had an error that some part wasn’t good so I wonder if this was the cause.
EDIT: I just swapped the circle out for a triangle, which I think will make the math better.
Final shape that has mostly worked.
my final shapes are easy enough to lay out on my own so I can probably skip cut layout this time.
Cut layout says unplacable undefined part. Even with the triangle. Don’t know which or why.
When I try to run each piece by itself I get this one too:
