As an enthusiastic, new owner of a 3 foot Syisyphus coffee table and a person who really enjoys this beautiful piece of art my home, I would also like the ability to put together a virtual group of people who have the technical ability, and the development ability and some novel ideas so that we can take this beautiful piece to a whole new level. Possibly, set it up to share our ideas with Bruce and the Sisyphus team.
They have done an amazing job of creating this magnificent piece of art, now let’s try to give back to them by helping and suggesting ways to make the designs we all probably want to experiment and play with.
My head is full of ideas already.
Steve
Hi Steve,
All I can say with regard to your idea is: "Aye, aye Captain!" We planned to create a repository of tracks for people to download and put out software to make it easier to compose new tracks, from the very start of this project. But reality imposed some priorities (like figuring out how to make and ship our tables :). We've had to delay setting this up ourselves due to lack of time and resources - but the goal has never changed. Help from the community is absolutely needed and welcome! A good place to start, if you're not already familiar with it, is with the stuff on our subreddit - links on our support pages:
http://sisyphusind.wpengine.com/how-do-i-get-more-tracks-paths/
http://sisyphusind.wpengine.com/how-do-i-create-my-own-paths/
Bruce
I'd like to learn more about how to create my own tracks. Seems most of the tools are Windows based - so if there is any need for someone on a Mac to be involved, I'm in! 🙂
Hi Mark,
Thanks for offering to help out. I apologize for not having documentation up yet (working on it). I will be filling in more details, but the essence of a track file is an ordered list of polar coordinates - each containing a Theta and Rho value (hence the extension for track files is ".thr"). Theta is in radians, and is in normalized length (0 - 1, where 0 is at the center, and 1 is at the farthest travel out). Unitizing the Rho value makes all tracks universal for any size table. All moves are from point to point, but instead of being linear as they would be in a Cartesian machine, they produce spiral arcs in this system. The simplest track file has just two points - an example being the "erase.thr" track:
#erase.thr (start a line with # to make it a comment)
#one vertex per line: Theta(real)<space>Rho(real from 0-1)
0 0
628.319 1
This causes a single spiral arc that wraps around the field 100 times (2*Pi radians * 100), as it moves from the center to the periphery. Some caveats:
- The first and last Rho values must be either 0 or 1 (they can be the same).
- The first Theta and last Theta don't matter - tracks play "relative" to wherever the were when they started.
- Just as you emulate curves with many small, straight lines in an XY environment, if you want straight lines, you must add vertices along them.
We are hoping to migrate our subreddit site to this forum - but if you are not already familiar with it, you should check it out to see what others have done so far. I do recall that SlightlyLoony is a Mac-only person, and he's been one of our strong pioneers.
My tracks were all created on a Mac as well. I haven't released any source (frankly, it's pretty hacky code), just tracks (at https://github.com/Dithermaster/sisyphus/tree/master/thr_paths).
What software do you use to create them?
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