Jelbert Data driven Archimedean spiral in OpenScad and Python

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This sculpture of sorts is my attempt at building a physical representation of an input data source. I chose the Archimedean spiral because it is compact and aesthetically pleasing. In this example, I am rendering speed data from a car journey where height represents speed throughout the journey. OpenScad is not able to read data files directly so it had to be done by creating a library containing the data vector (list of variables). This library file is then imported into the Openscad script and looped through to create the shape. The workflow is as follows: 1) The original data file is recorded / captured - in this case it is a driving journey from a car where the location and speed are captured every second using a GPS logger. The data source in this example is called "0000000_formatspd.json" and contains just the speed data and date time stamp per second. 2) I then run my Python based converter script called "trip2datascad.py" against this source data file which uses the speed component each second and writes it to "data.scad" (which is the OpenScad library). To run it you will need to type "python trip2datascad.py 0000000_formatspd.json data.scad" ... where the first parameter is the input filename and the second is the output filename. 3) I then open the main OpenScad script called "data_spiral.scad" which 'includes' the data.scad library so all of the data is available in a vector within the code. 4) In the OpenScad application, render the file and save as a .stl file ready for slicing and 3D printing! Some of the parameters of the disk and spiral are controlled via variables in the OpenScad code so you will need to adapt them if you use a different number of data points. You will see in my OpenScad code that the cubes to make the data driven part of the object are 2 by 2. I tried to make them smaller but Cura seems to take forever to slice the stl file. If you want to do something similar to this project then feel free to customise the OpenScad and Python code and upload as a Remix. Good luck 3D printing your data! Updates: 22nd September 2018 - minor update to data source file. 6th September 2018 - added additional text to base of spiral model. 3rd September 2018 - added the source car speed data JSON file