Hi Kevin,
A beautiful design! Thanks for sharing this with us...and the
information about NodeBox and your code.
best wishes,
Peter
On 15/07/2012 1:32 AM, Kevin Karney wrote:
Hi
Both my children have been married in ceremonies held in my brother's
garden. To celebrate these events and for his kindness, he gets a
sundial... !
You can see the final design for this dial at ...
_http://www.precisedirections.co.uk/Sundials_
The dial is almost an exact clone of a 1820's dial at the National
Trust's Ham House in London. I have added the Equation of Time flame and
various text. The dial will be photo-etched on 5mm phosphor bronze.
To make the graphics, I have used an absolutely free package called
NodeBox available only on the Macintosh. (A version for Linux & Windows
is under development). Like DeltaCad, Nodebox works from a text
description file using a language called Python - which is fairly
straightforward to learn if you are familiar with programming.
I have done quite a bit of general development work on my dial and
attached to this e-mail is the Python description file - which I thought
I would share with any of you who might be interested. All Apple Mac
users have to do is to download version 1.9 (not the experimental
version 2) of the software from _http://nodebox.net/_, install it, open
my attached file, press Command R and you get a gnomonically perfect
horizontal dial (or so I hope), which exports to a geometrically precise
.pdf file, which can go direct to the photo-etchers. If you wish, you
can change the dial's parameters and modify the code as you please to
make things work for you - no copyright. The attached file is just text,
so can be opened with any word processor. It's virus free, of course.
The code works in northern and southern hemispheres - not tested for the
tropics
The gnomon design varies with your latitude, but goes wild at high latitudes
You can choose hour numerals that point either outwards or inwards
It plots my Equation of Time "Flame" correct for your location and Time Zone
You can use any Font on your computer for the Hour & Minute markers -
(Roman or Arabic for the Hours)
All the dial furniture is transformed to point towards the foot of the style
The most complicated bit of the development was the routines to
transform the Hour numerals so that the fonts were first 'circularized'
(vertical lines pointing to dial centre, horizontal lines made radial),
then slanted so that radial lines point to the appropriate side of the
style's foot. This involved decomposing the fonts to their Bezier
curves, linearising the curves and then transforming the multitude
of linear segments. Modify those routines at your peril....
Let me know of any problems or errors.
Best regards
Kevin Karney
Freedom Cottage, Llandogo, Monmouth NP25 4TP, Wales, UK
51° 44' N 2° 41' W Zone 0
+ 44 1594 530 595
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The University of Adelaide, AUSTRALIA 5005
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Fax : +61 8 8313 3443
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