Tiling - The Drafting Table

Bangle Board

This post describes a couple of recent DIY projects I wanted to share. My wife has a collection of bangles and was looking for an efficient way to store and display them. I made a board with pegs to hang them on. Here it is after the main construction (which

Art

Aga and AGO

On a recent weekend I had a day-long layover in Toronto (deliberately). I took the opportunity to check out a couple of museums there: the Aga Khan museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario. The Aga Khan may be best known in Canada for controversy around gifting a vacation to

Math

That's a Moiré

The title of this post comes from this comic, although it's a topic I've been planning to write a bit about. Moiré patterns are wavy effects that appear when two regular patterns (grids, parallel lines, etc.) with similar spacing interfere with each other. Lighter and darker regions appear in locations

Tiling

Stochastic tiling script

A bit over a year ago, I wrote a post about the mathematics of tiling. In this post, I explore some of those ideas further with an octave script I wrote to draw regular and semi-regular tilings. The script %% stochastictiling.m - this is a script to draw regular and

3D Printing

My Latest 3D Printing

A week ago, I was having fun on Prince Edward Island so I didn't have time to blog. For this week, I thought I'd post about 3D printing since it's been awhile since I've done so. In a recent post I mentioned that I had a couple of DIY projects

Math

A tiling primer

This post is a brief introduction to the mathematics of tiling, which I find quite fascinating. Tiles are a long-standing architectural feature. They have been used in cultures all over the world, but the math underlying how they can cover a space with no gaps is universal. To convey an

3D Printing

3D-Printed Cactus Pot

This post is about one of my recent 3D-printing projects. Cactus I like having plants in my apartment, but anything that requires frequent attention would have a difficult time surviving under my care. I thought cactus would be a nice fit, due to their ability to withstand periods of water

Tiling

Hilbert Curve

One of my favourite topics in math is fractals. For this post, I drew the Hilbert Curve fractal in octave. The Hilbert Curve is a space-filling curve: although it is one-dimensional (a series of line segments) itself, it covers a two-dimensional area. I recently learned about this fractal from a

3D Printing

Writing an .stl file from scratch

The .stl file format (see also) is used for 3D printing and similar fabrication technologies. The files are normally created as output from design software, but I wanted to try writing one by hand since they are human readable (actually, both ASCII and binary versions are allowed by the file-type