In another thread (Random movements while cutting), @bar suggested we try to revive shetchChair, which I would assume we would do by forking it into the Community Garden. I’m not a java programmer, nor is making furniture my motivation for getting a Maslow, but because I am really interested in what the power of an active community like this one can do, I thought I’d float a trial balloon to see if we really want to do this.
I figure that making a new project in the Community Garden causes very little harm, it doesn’t take a large number of people interested to make it worthwhile to set the project up. Even if it sits awhile before it is worked on (lots of people are still trying to get their Maslow assembled and working, or are still exploring what it can do), it will act as a reminder that there is this tool for furniture design.
GPL3 licensed: https://github.com/DiatomStudio/SketchChair - the .jar didn’t run for me (it did but instantly crashed) on Ubuntu 17:10. It does seem like a cool fit, especially for the education part.
The website says it requires java 1.5 or above. The ‘above’ is likely not true after 6 years.
I checked into installing older java on linux and failed.
I’ve spent around 20 hours for the terminal error
Info: XInitThreads() called for concurrent Thread support
and gave up.
The debug log debug.log (3.4 KB)
is full of not found .
Seems like a hell lot of work to get that ‘up to date’.
Just to see it once I will try old ubuntu versions in VirtualBox to check if I can find one with a compatible java.
I wonder whether the answer might be all chipping in to get someone to port it to python, given that we know everyone running GC can run that. No idea about cost though - it was USD 31.000 to get it this far so I suspect we would need to be an order of magnitude smaller, or find some grant funding - maybe from the education side.
For what it’s worth, I was able to directly boot up the exe file on Windows 10 with current Java. Not particularly intuitive of a program but a solid concept to work off of.
To anyone interested, I did find their github repo. I am not a developer by any means but it seems that if we wanted to start a port it is a helpful resource.
