How to Build a Windmill, Part 2: Parts, Nuts, Bolts and Blades | Hacker News Reader

How to Build a Windmill, Part 2: Parts, Nuts, Bolts and Blades

jacquesmattheij.com

89 pointstisme10 comments

This is by leaps and bounds one of the best and most interesting posts I've read. Imagine if the front page had two, three or four posts of comparable value.

This is the result of a mature, disciplined and ambitious mind that has been influenced by open source. I strive to have such a legacy.

Thanks Jacques!

How on earth did a HTTP request header end up in your comment?!

I had the same thought several years ago. To that end I made a CMS designed to make writing this sort of post easy[1]. It never got out of closed beta because I just could not find people interested in doing and documenting projects. Most folks want to do one or the other - both is rare. Even this undeniably awesome windmill project still took eight years for the writeup to appear.

Anyway, I've still been using the CMS. Here is a small example of an incrementally written week-long project: Construction of an Eight Pound Candybar[2]

[1] http://redraftable.com/about/

[2] http://kmkeen.com/candybar2/

Wow, I wish I had the ability to whip up a 3D simulator of a wood lathe. Impressive work, Jacques!

Most of the heavy lifting there is done by the opengl libraries, it's mostly a matter of plugging in the coordinates of the voxels and setting up a viewport. Hardware acceleration does the rest :)

Part 1 (yesterday) discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4579932

When is the kickstarter for this? ;)

The page references http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-make-a-windmill , which is a 404 ( s/make/build/ )

Also, s/Wtpfl/Wtfpl/

Anyone know if the code's online anywhere, thought I'd ask before d/ling the 300mb package. Always like having a bit of a nosey at someone else's code.

No, sorry it's just there in the tar.gz. The bulk of it is images for the plasmacutter controller.

edit: ok, I've expanded the tar.gz in http://jacquesmattheij.com/windmill/

Reminder: this is very ugly code, a jumble of scripts (python and - gasp - php) and C to get the job done (which was not at all the focus, I wanted to get the windmill up).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com