Dear Kevin,
You wrote " I would love to hear from anyone working on a similar
approach. "
I use the freeware Scilab <http://www.scilab.org/> to produce the spider
hour lines and the month circles and the contours and holes of the
dial. The graphic is exported to pdf by Scilab. All further editing is
done in Adobe Illustrator. The drawings for the laser cutter and the
laser engraver are dxf exports of pdf files, also produced by AI.
Best wishes
Helmut
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Am 02.06.2016 14:37, schrieb Kevin Karney:
Dear Gnomonists
Recently, there has been a small correspondence about Spider Dials. This
message mainly concerns those who like to do all their gnomonic calculations
programatically.
I attach a short text file that contains the routines needed to prepare spider
curves for a horizontal dial with a gnomon of given thickness. Computer
routines are usually language and implementation specific (as these are), but
the logic and gnomonics provided are correct (or so I hope and pray). The
language is Python, which is easily read and quite easily adaptable to any
other language (e.g. Java).
For me, the advantage of using a programical approach is that I use the same
program to prepare graphics files that can be sent to...
i) a laser engraver to make a cheap plywood maquette of my design to check
things out
ii) a water jet cutting company to cut out the dial plate and gnomon
iii) a photo-etching company to create the dial.
I am current working on the routines to generate G-Code that can go direct to a
CNC routing engraver. I would love to hear from anyone working on a similar
approach.
Best wishes
Kevin
p.s anyone who wants the astronomical routines mentioned in the text file have
only to ask!
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