

How to Build a Windmill, Part 2: Parts, Nuts, Bolts and Blades - tisme
http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-build-a-windmill-ii

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kvnn
This is by leaps and bounds one of the best and most interesting posts I've
read. Imagine if the front page had two, three or four posts of comparable
value.

This is the result of a mature, disciplined and ambitious mind that has been
influenced by open source. I strive to have such a legacy.

Thanks Jacques!

~~~
keenerd
I had the same thought several years ago. To that end I made a CMS designed to
make writing this sort of post easy[1]. It never got out of closed beta
because I just could not find people interested in _doing_ and _documenting_
projects. Most folks want to do one or the other - both is rare. Even this
undeniably awesome windmill project still took eight years for the writeup to
appear.

Anyway, I've still been using the CMS. Here is a small example of an
incrementally written week-long project: Construction of an Eight Pound
Candybar[2]

[1] <http://redraftable.com/about/>

[2] <http://kmkeen.com/candybar2/>

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yardie
Wow, I wish I had the ability to whip up a 3D simulator of a wood lathe.
Impressive work, Jacques!

~~~
jacquesm
Most of the heavy lifting there is done by the opengl libraries, it's mostly a
matter of plugging in the coordinates of the voxels and setting up a viewport.
Hardware acceleration does the rest :)

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johnx123-up
Part 1 (yesterday) discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4579932>

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savrajsingh
When is the kickstarter for this? ;)

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jholman
The page references <http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-make-a-windmill> ,
which is a 404 ( s/make/build/ )

Also, s/Wtpfl/Wtfpl/

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mattmanser
Anyone know if the code's online anywhere, thought I'd ask before d/ling the
300mb package. Always like having a bit of a nosey at someone else's code.

~~~
jacquesm
No, sorry it's just there in the tar.gz. The bulk of it is images for the
plasmacutter controller.

edit: ok, I've expanded the tar.gz in <http://jacquesmattheij.com/windmill/>

Reminder: this is _very_ ugly code, a jumble of scripts (python and - gasp -
php) and C to get the job done (which was not at all the focus, I wanted to
get the windmill up).

