Fabripod

get 10% off Fabripod on OpenSky.com!

cchalmers — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:03:38 +0000

Check out social shopping on OpenSky.com and get 10% off fabripod lamps! Plus see the products celebrities and taste-makers love!

East bay HUB – center for innovation and entrepeneurship

cchalmers — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:39:15 +0000

The HUB is a project to create local spaces for people to gather and inspire, connect, and empower each other and their communities. The HUB group has created coworking spaces, creative spaces, and community centers all over the world, and the next one is planned for Oakland, which, right now, is undergoing an amazing renaissance. But they need your help!

The East bay HUB is now just over halfway to their goal on Kickstarter, but they still need more support!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/konda/what-makes-you-come-alive-bring-it-to-the-hub-0

Plus you can get one of these awesome T shirts or hoodies!

Fabsie Rocks!

cchalmers — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:57:20 +0000

We’re super excited that James McBennett and Fabsie.com made their Kickstarter goal today for the This Stool Rocks campaign. That means you have only 3 days left to order your rocking stool through kickstarter, and own a piece of history. The good news is that James and his group will now begin building their cutting edge system for bringing you cool furniture that is…

community designed,

globally distributed,and

locally manufactured!

I can’t even go into all the reasons this is cool, but here are a few:

low barriers to entry for aspiring designers
fewer greenhouse gas emissions from shipping
benefits local economies
‘long tail‘ designs you’d never see in big stores
customizable designs

And here are just a few examples of the types of things we might soon see on fabsie (from James McBennett’s pinterest page)

30% off Fabripod on Touch of Modern!

cchalmers — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 22:34:49 +0000

Our best selling lamps will be on touchofmodern.com for the next 5 days at 30% off!!

Testing new PLA plastic material!

cchalmers — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 07:04:49 +0000

This is a new material I am looking into for the white plastic lamps. PLA plastic is a biopolymer made from corn. That means it’s biodegradable (over a looong time) and smells a little bit like cotton candy when its cut on the laser! It’s a bit smoother than the plastic (styrene) I currently use and it cuts surprisingly well. Most of the settings I tried yielded a passable edge, but the winner is below. Now, the question is if I can source it in a small enough quantity. Right now, the minimum order is 1000kg (2,205lbs). Yikes!

Beautiful short film about Sea Urchins on vimeo!

cchalmers — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:28:44 +0000

Sea Urchins – Planktonic Origins from Parafilms on Vimeo.

Sea Urchins are amazing!

Fabsie.com – set to revolutionize furniture manufacturing

cchalmers — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 07:20:16 +0000

“Fabsie was founded with a rebellious spirit and a lofty objective: to create high-quality, brilliantly designed and digitally crafted furniture at a revolutionary price point.”

Award winning designer James McBennett is launching a Kickstarter campaign to revolutionize the way furniture is designed, made and sold. Buy his rocking stool and back his project on Kickstarter.

Fab X Fabripod!

cchalmers — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:31:23 +0000

Fabripod lamps are on Fab.com for the next 7 days! click on the ink below to get up to 20% off!!

http://fab.com/sale/17589/

Chrysalis on github

cchalmers — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 06:09:58 +0000

Since the project has evolved officially to HTML5 and WebGL, there’s no more reason to sit on the source code for this version of chrysalis. This processing sketch will read a grasshopper file (ghx) from version 0.8.0066 or previous, and output processing code with the same geometry. It’s a proof of concept and only works with some grasshopper components. (points, sliders, text panels and 4 point surfaces). Download (or fork!) the source code here:

https://github.com/fabripod/chrysalis

It contains the chrysalisAlpha.pde sketch plus two ghx files and resulting output sketches. see this post for instructions on installing processing and getting all the folders in the rich places (processing can be finicky about that). Good Luck!

Update – Chrysalis(alpha)

cchalmers — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 02:18:29 +0000

Chrysalis is a little project I’ve been working on to translate parametric models from standard 3D Cad platforms to web-based interactive storefronts. The idea is to give small-shop designers the ability to quickly publish their designs with parametric options enabled. This way customers can take an active part in the creation of their product, and fabrication can happen on the fly, similar to my Urchin lamp. See previous posts on this project here.

Proof of Concept

A test project in Grasshopper: It has basic parametric functionality using sliders to control height, width, depth, thickness and skew angle of table legs.

Chrysalis(alpha) is a proof-of-concept processing sketch that reads the Grasshopper (.ghx) file and stores the names and parameters of the grasshopper components in a new processing file. So far only a limited number of components are addressed:

Sliders
3D points
text panels (AKA stickies)
basic math (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division)
4 point surfaces

Issues to Resolve

Try out the first test applet here. Notice something funny? Right, the sliders don’t work! That’s because they need openGL and it’s not supported in the web browser. Issues with OpenGL dependent libraries and the hassle of signing java applets are just a few of the problems we’ve run into using processing to generate web content. The new javascript based HTML5 Canvas platform is much more appealing. Future builds of Chrysalis will output javascript instead of processing, and rely on WebGL cameras and JQuery libraries instead of OpenGl cameras and controlP5 libraries.

Participate!

Download (or fork!) the source here: https://github.com/fabripod/chrysalis