Customizable Sundial
Description
Instructions
The Horizontal Sundial is easily customized to your location. Start by finding your latitude and longitude (in decimal degrees) here: universimmedia.pagesperso-orange.fr/geo/loc.htm
Longitude may be positive or negative; Latitude will be positive. (Otherwise you're in the Southern Hemisphere. Refer to the Caveat above.) Note you must indicate both your exact Latitude as well as the range of your latitude in degrees. This because of an OpenSCAD limitation.
Then find your time zone correction here: timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/ There are many different names for time zones. At the site, simply use Find in your browser to look up the correction for your time zone.
Now use Customerizer to enter your data and make an awesome custom sundial!
Note: Although there are other sundials on Thingiverse, this one was created from scratch to be customizable.
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I am love sundials, and I've printed one of the others here. Giving this one a try as well.
I've found 2 things.
1) The Latitude Range isn't obvious what it is. I had to peak at the source code to see the comments so I could pick the right value.
2) Longitude that ends with a 0 seems to not work right. example: -88.24450
The easy fix is to remove the 0 at the end, it will then render right.
Very cool! Can you scale this up and down without affecting it's time keeping?
Facts:
1 - text and lines display perfectly when using OpenSCAD directly.
2- text and lines do not display correctly in Customizer.
Conclusion:
Ugly bug in Customizer, or it's not really ready to do anything but simple stuff. Hopefully, it will be fixed before the end of the contest so people can see what an Awesome Sundial this is!
Note:
This is *extremely* frustrating after all the effort I went to to create this and make it "customizable". Since it's fine in OpenSCAD and I followed the MakerBot rules for customization carefully, I would expect better.
Hi, nice script!
The problem with text not showing is because you're not specifying the write font. It works locally because the path to the default font behaves differently locally. We're actually going to be adding a fix for this tomorrow!
Also, the reason the object is showing up smaller than you'd expect (and the lines not showing well because of it) is because of the way Customizer calculates the size of the object. It takes into account all shapes even shapes that don't show because for instance they could be part of a difference() operation. If you reduce the size of the shapes, then the final object should be centered and zoomed in better. This is on our todo list to improve in the future.
I ran the customizer and I didn't get any letters on the sundial! When I pasted the code into OpenSCAD it worked okay. Anybody else have this problem?
You might want to check that you are using the writecylinder() function exactly correctly against the cylinder you created because because from my experience, OpenSCAD is much more forgiving than the Customizer. I spent a whole day working on this exact problem with my own Customizer code where everything looked good on the PC, but once I put it in Customizer, no letters.
Maybe I should mention how to use a sundial for those who may not know. It's mighty simple. Place it in the sun. (Easier said than done in Oregon!) Put it on a level surface and point the large end of the center triangle (called the gnomon) to true North (not magnetic north as indicated on a compass). Read the time as where the shadow of the upper edge of the gnomon falls.
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Fun print. I made one about a month ago and came back to generate another but it seems to be broke. I keep getting an error on the page saying "Parser error in line 506: syntax error" . Hopefully this will be fixed soon.:(
Looks like some sort of bug in Customizer. I haven't touched any of the files and SW doesn't just rot from disuse. :>)}}
Hope for a fix in Customizer, or (better) download the OpenSCAD file and run it directly.