Visible Physible Family Trees

3D Printing & Imaging
Visible Physible Family Trees

Last September, I wrote about the Thingiverse “Cube Gears” phenomenon, briefly tracing the origin of user emmett’s Screwless Cube Gears through its evolution from Haruki Nakamura’s papercraft geared heart sculpture via user GregFrost’s printable Broken Heart thing.

At the time, I really wanted to exhaust the graph of the cube gears / heart gears phenomenon, but didn’t have the available free time. I’ve had some good publishing experiences using Graphviz to generate directed graphs, before, and kept dreaming about using it to show the family tree of Thingiverse physibles descended from Broken Heart.

Well, I finally got around to doing it.

These data were mostly gathered manually, but Thingiverse is already tracking derivation information for things, and it would not be a great coding challenge to automate the generation of these types of graphs using Graphviz, which is free software.  The image above is static, but if you click on it, you should be directed to an interactive SVG version that allows you to navigate to the various things as you please. you should be fully clickable so you can navigate to the various things as you please. If you can’t see SVG, for whatever reasons, there’s also a large (static) image here. The Graphviz source code is available here.

These data were gathered on 2012-06-06 and are already obsolete, I should note. The graph has at least one new node since then.

More:
Automatic image index maker software

Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!
Tagged

I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

View more articles by Sean Michael Ragan

ADVERTISEMENT

Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 - Mare Island, CA

Escape to an island of imagination + innovation as Maker Faire Bay Area returns for its 15th iteration!

Buy Tickets today! SAVE 15% and lock-in your preferred date(s).

FEEDBACK