A project that I’ve been working on every now and then is an Arduino and Slow Cooker based Sous-vide immersion bath. You can use a cheap PID controller and temperature probe to do this, but I wanted to build one based on the Arduino in order to provide a bit more “hackability” and fun. For example you can connect to a PC via USB, attach displays and peripherals, alter the source code, or run the “Sousviduino” using a web browser, etc., etc.

The Sousviduino is nearing completion, so hopefully I’ll be able to test these ideas in the near future.

From Wikipedia: Sous-vide (pronounced /su??vi?d/), French for “under vacuum”,^[1] is a method of cooking food sealed in airtight plastic bags in a water bath^[2] for a long time—72 hours is not unusual—at an accurately determined temperature much lower than normally used for cooking, typically around 60 °C or 140 °F. The intention is to maintain the integrity of ingredients

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There’s a good tutorial on using SketchUp with the Big Blue Saw (it’s been around for a while – but I never got around to putting it on my site). It uses my SketchUp SVG plugin and then saves from Inkscape as DXF. Big Blue Saw offers a laser and waterjet cutting service for one-offs and prototypes using wood, fabric, metal and plastics.

It makes me think that I should update my code to output DXF (I’ve already started with GCode for my Contraptor Mini CNC). My todo list continues to grow…

Since March last year there hasn’t been a lot of activity on this site. The reason is that I’ve been mainly dividing my time between learning to be a parent and sleeping. Somewhere in that mix I also make time to go to work. To get into the swing of posting interesting stuff on my site again, I thought that I’d share something that I designed and made at work last year… a giant glass and laser multitouch screen.

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I have received a few emails lately about using the SVG outlines plugin to produce better layouts. I decided to create a video tutorial which shows the way in which I approach my layouts. The video (following the link) uses a SketchUp file that someone sent me as part of an exchange about using the plugin (I hope to see this become a real life object in the near future).

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I’ve been working hard to add some more functionality to the SketchUp SVG outline plugin.

The latest version is 0.99 (download here). The following functionality has been added:

Exporting text annotations

Changing line colours and width

Launching your SVG editor from SketchUp

Now to pull all of the documentation together and create a decent help system for the plugin…

The last little tidbit that I’ve added to SVG exporting from SketchUp is the ability to have an SVG editor load your file once an export has completed. This should save you a few seconds and is really good with iterative work where you may want to switch between 2D and 3D.

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When exporting SVG from SketchUp, I found that I wanted to set default line colours and thicknesses from within SketchUp, so that I didn’t have to change them from within my SVG editor.

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One of the problems when creating a 2D cutting layout from a 3D model is that it is hard to keep track of pieces and remember how they fit together. I thought that a good way to address the problem would be to take SketchUp text annotations and convert them into SVG text or shapes, so I added this to my SVG plugin.

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I have finally pulled my CNC model apart piece by piece in SketchUp and constructed a Bill of Materials (BOM). Now I am finally ready to start exporting to SVG. The first change that I’ll be making to the code is a way to carry SketchUp annotations through to a SVG document. I realised that I needed this functionality when I looked at my parts and noticed that some are quite hard to tell apart. I also need a way to link the BOM, 3D model, assembly instructions, and laser cut parts by using identifiers etched into the parts.

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The reason that I’ve spent a bit of time updating my SVG exporter for SketchUp is the new project that I’ve been working on. The sketchup model below has taken me about two months (of nights) to complete and about five revisions. The laser cutting project is ready to move to the 2D layout phase and I still have some functionality to add to my plugin code.

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