Microsoft giveth, and Microsoft taketh away

In a wierd coincidence, the day after I published my last blog entry on the availability of Caligari Truespace, a now free and formerly expensive 3d design and animation package, Microsoft has decided to kill the package. This probably explains why the initial availability of this software wasn't advertised in the media more by Microsoft.

Since this is one of the best packages available for 3d design and even includes physically based modeling capabilities, I find this decision by Microsoft to be very unfortunate. I am now looking into a package that costs nearly $10,000 (Autodesk Inventor) to replace this capability.


If anyone reading this has influence at Microsoft, please ask them to reconsider the killing of this product.

For those of you who still want to download the software and video training, it is still available at http://www.caligari.com (hurry, it won't be there for long). Here is the full text of the letter sent to all Truespace users by the founder of Caligari, Roman Ormandy:

Dear Caligari customer,

You may have heard that Microsoft Corporation, reacting to difficult business conditions, has been evaluating many of the products it produces and making the difficult decision to reduce investment in certain areas.

It is with regret that I have to tell you that trueSpace is one of the products affected. As a consequence, you will see reduction or elimination of services offered for trueSpace. For example, there will be no phone or email support offered for trueSpace by Microsoft, and our web site may also be affected. While the dates are not absolutely fixed, some services and contacts may come to an end as early as Friday May 22^nd 2009, while others will continue as long as possible with no firm cutoff date available yet.

While we are working to minimize negative impact for the community, here are some things you may want to plan for in near future:

1. For those who have purchased and paid for Caligari products, download a copy of all purchased software from the repeat downloads area.
Please log in with your username and password at:
http://cart1.caligari.com/ebuy2/enterdownloads.asp
If you have forgotten either your user name or password, please visit:
http://cart1.caligari.com/forms/memberform.asp

Ensure you keep the copies and information in a safe place, as they may not be available for download again. Be sure you also have a copy of all required serial numbers, as there will be no support staff to assist you after a certain date.

2. For those who have downloaded trueSpace7.6 since it became free, if you do not already have a copy of the installer kept on your hard drive or on CD / DVD, you may wish to download the trueSpace7.6 installer and keep a copy in a safe place.
Please log in with your username and password at:
http://cart1.caligari.com/web/Truespacemainreg.aspx
If you have forgotten either your user name or password, please visit:
http://cart1.caligari.com/forms/tsmemberform.asp

3. Download a copy of any training that you wish to keep from our main website.

4. Download any useful plug-ins you wish to keep from the forums.

5. Download any useful information, training, tips etc from the forums that you wish to keep.

6. Contact any Caligari staff or forum users who you wish to keep in touch with, and arrange to have an alternative email address to contact them.

As a community you may decide to set up a new forum or meeting place. Please use the existing forums to announce the location of that new meeting space, and we will also strive to put that information onto our main website. I personally plan to visit any such meeting place to keep in touch with you and hear about your new plans.

All of us here in the Caligari team would like to thank everyone in our community for your long-standing support of trueSpace and Caligari. Our community – that is, all of you – were truly one of our best assets, and you have created incredible work, and we hope you will continue on to do even more amazing things.

I personally want to thank all of the Caligari staff for their amazing contribution to development of trueSpace and building of this community. During 25 years of trueSpace history the product made a difference in lives of many people and the world is a better place for it.

Roman Ormandy,
Caligari Founder

There is a free lunch - Caligari Truespace

Truespace by Caligari

Two years ago my son and I were looking for a 3d modeling and animation software package. After much comparison shopping we decided on Truespace from Caligari. I paid over one thousand dollars for the software and some training videos. We were highly productive with this software.

Well, in a bid to compete against Google's Google Sketch-up (also a free tool from Google), Microsoft purchased Caligari and has made Truespace a free product. On top of that, all of the training videos are now free. For some reason, this has not received a lot of press. I highly recommend Truespace.

I recently attempted to design a vertical axis wind turbine blade using Google Sketch-up. I found that Google Sketchup has some excellent intuitive drawing techniques, but fell short as a CAD tool. I had no problem modeling the wind turbine blades, but found that trying to machine holes in the blades to allow machine screws to connect the layers together was an inaccurate and inconsistent process. I abandoned Google Sketchup after wasting days trying to get around these bugs. I also found that outputing to STL (stereo lithography file format) from Sketch-up was a dicey process. I need STL files to produce 3D objects on my CNC machine using the DeskCNC software (only option is DXF for 2D and STL for 3D).

I abandoned Google Sketchup and instead purchased and downloaded Viacad 2D/3D for $99 from Punch Software and was able to recreate my turbine wings in one day.

Several days after that, I came across the news that Caligari Truespace was now free so I downloaded that onto my Vista-64 Quad Processor workstation and began playing with that. My son is an expert with Truespace so I am now learning the software from him, and from the video tutorials. I hope to produce a simulation of my next generation wind turbines in Truespace, which also has some physically based modeling capabilities. The first thing I am trying is to export models created in Viacad into Truespace for assembly into a rotating VAWT.

I will post the videos of this at a later time.

New Airfoil-Based Wind Turbine

This is a preview of our new turbine. This turbine is still under development but is performing very well in initial tests.

This turbine is much lighter and faster than previous turbines I've built. For one, it is a lift based turbine utilizing symmetrical airfoils rather than a drag based turbine such as the Savonius. This has both advantages and disadvantages. This turbine really goes, but the Savonius starts up easier in super light winds.

I would like to thank the following companies who produced custom products or provided services which were integrated into this turbine prototype.

Liberty Machine and Tool - http://www.libertymachine.net/

SENSYR - http://sensyr.com

FC Sails - http://www.fcsails.com/

Thermal Foams, Inc. = http://www.thermalfoams.com/

Otherpower.com - http://otherpower.com

Here is a YouTube video of this prototype turbine.

Eye-Fi update

I had problems with my Eye-Fi card (click here for my previous blog entry on this). It would just stop working after a while in my security camera application. Then one day I logged into the Eye-Fi Manager and received a message that my Eye-Fi card was recalled. Eye-Fi then shipped me a new card within two days and a mailer to return the old card.

Now, I am having much better luck with the new card and have run it over a day now with my CHDK motion detecting script. I have the Canon A590IS camera pointed out into my front yard and have caught some birds at my feeder. I am not a bird watcher so if anyone can tell me what kind of birds these are, I would appreciate it.

I will post my test results with running the Eye-Fi card based security solution in the near future and hopefully I can report that it has run for many days or even weeks.

Gear-Wheel Designer Vastly Improved

When I wanted to couple my prototype Savonius wind turbine to an off-the-shelf alternator, I decided to use gears. I cut the gears on my IMService CNC machine using an inexpensive piece of software from Delph Electronics called the Gear-Wheel Designer

Graham Baxter's Gear-Wheel Designer with G-code generator lets you type in a few parameters, press a button, and get a DXF file of a gear, along with G-code to run a CNC machine. This program allowed me to make gears to electrify my wind turbine without being an expert on gear cutting. Click here to see a video of the wind turbine in action.

The user interface of the Gear-Wheel Designer is quite simple and contains a parameter area and a graphical preview of the gear to be rendered:

Here is a picture of a gear produced from the software.

The latest release has the ability to create five gear types as opposed to just cycloidal and involute gears in the previous release. The new release added the capability to design ratchet wheels, dead-beat ratchet wheels and anchor ratchet wheels. See this page for more detail on the new gear/wheel types. Also added was the ability to create wheels with spokes as shown above. There are also a number of other new features as this release was a complete rewrite of the software. They let you download the user manual prior to purchase so I advise doing this to find out more details about the software prior to purchase. This software does not attempt to teach you terminology or gear design concepts so if you are like me and don't know much about gears, you should do some research prior to machining your gears.

This software is definitely a bargain at less than $80 to purchase. I just upgraded to the latest version and will be trying it out on my next generation vertical wind turbine. I am also going to try my hand at machining a pendulum clock. Watch this blog for future updates if interested in gears.

Canon A590 IS + Eye-Fi Card + CHDK open source software = FUN

A friend of mine owns a liquor store and was robbed recently of some high priced bourbon. He had a professionally installed security camera system which recorded the thief's car leaving the parking lot. Unfortunately, the detail of the NTSC video output was insufficient to recognize the license plate number, hampering the investigation by the police.


I wondered why the resolution in pixels in security cameras hasn't improved much since the 1950's. I researched some newer, higher definition, security cameras, and found a very nice one:


The Sony EVI-HD1

"The Sony EVI-HD1 is a color motorized PTZ camera that can be switched from displaying standard NTSC/PAL resolution video to outputting high definition images with a maximum resolution of 1080i. By starting off with such outstanding video quality, images will retain their sharpness and color depth even under extreme digital magnification."

This is a very nice piece of equipment. Unfortunately, it costs over four thousand dollars. Because of the price, this was not a cost effective purchase for a small liquor store.


I began to look around and found out about the EYE-FI card, a secure digital card with 2GB of storage combined with a limited Wi-fi capability. I already new about CHDK, an open source software project which allows one to "take over" the firmware of certain models of Canon digital cameras. I researched work done by the many programmer volunteers who contribute to CHDK, and came up with a solution which combines a Canon A590 IS inexpensive point and shoot camera, an Eye-Fi Card, and CHDK open source software to produce a "poor man's" high definition security camera. Total hardware outlay for the development prototype was less than $300. Now, because of sales on the camera and chip, this number can drop to under $200. While it does not have remote pan and zoom capability, it does have very high 8 Megapixel resolution, which may preclude the need to pan and tilt by instead using an optional wide angle lens to cover a large area of a parking lot. Also, being more inexpensive than the alternative would allow the deployment of multiple DIY cams for the price of a single high end camera.

I wrote a script to run under the CHDK firmware which detects motion, snaps a picture, uses the eye-fi card to send the picture to a PC or photo sharing site over my home wi-fi network, and then automatically delete old images on the eye-fi card so the card does not run out of space (this should be built into the eye-fi card but is not). I used a language called LUA, used to write advanced scripts under CHDK, and eventually got the camera to successfully upload eight gigabyte images in real time. Here are some images I was able to capture in my front yard while pointing the camera at a bird feeder (you can click on the images to see them at 1600 x 1200, the actual images out of the camera are at 3264 x 2448 pixels which is too big for my blogging software to upload):

This week I will be stress testing this solution. Others working with the eye-fi card in similar endeavors on the CHDK wiki report that they are having reliability problems with the eye-fi card after 18 hours of constant use. They are attacking the problem by using an embedded computer to reboot the camera by simulating depression of the power switch. I am going to see how long I can run this system without a lockup before attempting to make any hardware modifications of my own. Obviously, to be used a security camera, the system must be reliable. I am not putting this into the liquor store until it has run at least a month in my house without failure. I will keep you abreast of the project as it progresses. My final script will be published on the CHDK forum. I am going to get back on wind turbines and RF remotes later this week.






Where to buy items discussed in this blog post

Alternative Energy in Spain

While traveling in Spain for six weeks to study alternative energy and green technologies, I have observed some interesting trends.


I have been staying in a small pueblo named Casas de Benitez. Casas de Benitez has a population of slightly more than 1,000 people, and is flanked with wind generators (called molinetas by the locals) and solar cell farms. Everywhere I have gone in Spain over the past month (mostly in the Castilla-La Mancha region) has been dotted with wind turbines and solar cell farms. I recently drove from Casas de Benitez to Alicante for some sailing, and constantly passed wind farms.

We also passed a wide load on the highway which turned out to be a huge semi hauling three 100 meter blades for a new turbine installation.


This is the area of Spain where Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, and Molinos were used to grind wheat into flower for centuries. As I walked through the narrow streets of Casas de Benitez, vacant lots were covered which grains of wheat drying in the hot summer sun and in preparation for grinding by molinas (not wind powered in this case).



Spain's wind output has doubled over the last three years and will double again before 2010. While we are seeing wind power growth in the US, it is not as dramatic as in Spain. Helping things more, Spain's wind turbines, for the most part large HAWTs (horizontal axis wind turbines), are much lighter than most due to new technology developed in Spain.I hope that wind power in the US will now grow at faster rates. Certainly the gasoline price increases and resultant economic effects will help make the country take a long term look at alternative energy. Hopefully we won't repeat the shortsighted mistakes that were made in the 1970's after the first gas crisis abated and prices dropped.

More information on Spain's wind power growth can be read in this interesting article from MITs Technology Review. I found it very interesting the all wind farms in Spain are linked together and controlled by a central computing facility. Take time to play the interview video (available in several languages) at the MIT website because it is extremely interesting.