Hi Kevin, That looks very good - I'll certainly be interested to see it in bronze. >From memory, there are two dials at Ham House - which is this an "almost exact >clone" of?
Regards, John ------------------------------------------------- Dr J Davis Flowton Dials --- On Sat, 14/7/12, Kevin Karney <kar...@me.com> wrote: From: Kevin Karney <kar...@me.com> Subject: A Nodebox Sundial (for Macintosh users - only) To: "Sundial List" <sundial@uni-koeln.de> Date: Saturday, 14 July, 2012, 17:02 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 -----Inline Attachment Follows----- --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
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