tg44/printing-pipelines repository overview

⁠3d-mural-gen

This repository is build for various 3d-printing model generation automation.

At the moment it has 2 packages containing classes to help model writing and rendering, and has 2 package with actual "thing" generators.

This project is build with the scala language. If you are not familiar with the language, I'm sadly admit that the code-quality will not help you to understand things.

⁠Utility code

⁠OpenScad

This package is mostly openscad related code. It has an abstract scala layer to work with openScad native objects. Basically this is a big code generator and language definition layer.

With these helpers you can generate the raw scad file, the stl, or even pop up a viewer as you like.

(For model generation, you will need to have the openscad command configured and available as a commandline program too. For linux it is done if you installed it. For mac and windows pls read the docs⁠)

Most of the code in this package inspired by the dzufferey/scadla⁠ library.

⁠Pipeline

This package contains the machinery of parallel multi node execution. It has a webserver which can queue up tasks, and it has consumers whoes can consume and solve them and upload the result (stl) to S3.

This could be seemed a little overkill, but when one model is ten minutes, and you want to render ~200 of them it can be really handy!

The pipeline is Api->RabbitMQ->consumers->S3 where all the started applications are both have the api and the consumer role.

⁠Model code

⁠Cellpattern

Inspired by this Conway's World⁠ project.

You need to add the initial cells, and the generation number, and this will generate an (in theory) printable tower.

⁠Mural

Inspired by the 3DMNmural project⁠ and Cha Yong Rye⁠.

The main idea is to generate OpenLockable Hexa tiles based on a height-map.

The output is similar to this⁠.

(I started to build the pipeline when I realized that the GrandCanyon is about 4h of computation on 8 threads, and if I ever want this to grow as a service for others; 4h is a really long time for a single request.)

⁠Local testing, building, deploying

We have a docker-compose file which brings up a rabbitMq and a Minio instance locally. Both are configured for easy local developement. (RabbitMQ management UI on localhost:15672 Minio UI on localhost:9001.)

We also have a Dockerfile which builds a ~minimal image after compiled the code. The created image has a build in openscad so it can work instantly after deployed and configured properly.

Which we don't have currently: config from env-vars. It's on my todo list implicitly.

⁠Future

My todo list:

1. I want to try this out on (aws) spot instances to test if it really scales well or not.
2. I want to make a "user friendly" UI for the cellpattern generator and the mural generator too.
3. I want to try out if the generated cell-pattern is actually printable or not :D (The mural is working!)
4. I want to make the mural job to be parametrized with a cutting shape (so you can cut out countries, islands or continents).
5. I want to implement other generators just for fun.
6. If this can be a thing, I want to host a version, with autoscaling aws instances!

⁠Interested?

If you are interested in the project, or has ideas pls write an issue, if sb wants to understand the code, I can help there (or maybe document/clean it a bit more, start an official discord server for it etc.).

If you are coming with openscad + basic high-level programing background I think the cellpattern is a good starting point (not the Generator but the other classes). (If you are lost in the language use the "click into" or the scala what is googlesearch methods.)

Every idea is welcome!