Magic Snake Builder

thingiverse

Only for the OpenSCAD enthusiasts out there - there's not really any sane way to make this "Customizer-able". A virtual Magic Snake(TM) of whatever length you need. Not as tactilely satisfying as a real snake, but it does provide a different kind of mental stimulation to work out how to build the model you want. Start with a wedge(). Then add wedges onto it (above it in the code), specifying how many clicks in which direction you want to go. I warn you, this is going to hurt your brain, because the first wedge() is the last piece in the chain, and each new one that you add will always go at the origin and then rotate the rest of the chain around itself. Very disorienting. But it's the only way I could think of to do the coordinate transforms... I provided a "space fighter" as an example. I'm working on other examples as well. Don't make a real adjustable Magic Snake(TM) out of this. I don't want to infringe. It was just an interesting mental challenge to get the translations and rotations right and provide an easy interface for building the chain. Thought I'd pass it along in case it entertained anyone else. Oh, and it takes forever to compile. I tried using render() to cache parts, and even give you a way to not use the edge rounding, but it's always slow (at least on my machine). Update 10-7-2018: - Added a ball model familiar to anyone who ever owned one of these. - Had to tweak some settings to make rounded edges work properly when folded up tight like that. Added the "fit test" model to make sure things fit after folding around. - Those tweaks introduced some gaps, so I added some "pegs" to the wedges that really only serve to make sure something is connecting the adjacent wedges. - Played with the "rounding" parameter to see how much flexibility I had. With "width" set to 20, rounding=0.5 seems about right for a "real" snake, and rounding=2.0 yields the stylized shape you see in the second ball model. Rounding=5.0 is unrecognizable. I'd say rounding probably shouldn't exceed 10% of width, in general.