Visible Physible Family Trees

3D Printing & Imaging
Visible Physible Family Trees

Last September, Iย wroteย about the Thingiverse โ€œCube Gearsโ€ phenomenon, briefly tracing the origin of user emmettโ€™sย Screwless Cube Gearsย through its evolution fromย Haruki Nakamuraโ€™s papercraft geared heart sculptureย via user GregFrostโ€™s printableย Broken Heartย thing.

At the time, I really wanted to exhaust the graph of the cube gears / heart gears phenomenon, but didnโ€™t have the available free time. Iโ€™ve hadย some good publishing experiencesย usingย Graphvizย 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. ย 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 canโ€™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.

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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 โ€“ Magazin fรผr Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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