demakein 0.4

Design woodwind instruments and make them with a 3D printer or CNC mill.

Demakein

Paul Harrison - [e-mail]

Demakein is a set of Python tools for designing and making woodwind instruments.

This generally consists of two stages:

• The “design” stage is a numerical optimization that chooses the bore shape and the finger hole placement, size, and depth necessary for the instrument to produce the correct notes for a given set of fingerings.

• The “make” stage takes a design and turns it into a 3D object, then then cuts the object into pieces that can be CNC-milled or 3D-printed.

Demakein can either be used via the command “demakein” or as a library in Python. Demakein has been designed to be extensible, and I hope you will find it relatively easy to write code to create your own novel instruments. You can either create subclasses of existing classes in order to tweak a few parameters, or create wholly new classes using existing examples as a template.

Requirements

The “design” tools require nesoni. They should work on all platforms that Python runs on.

• nesoni

  pip install nesoni

The “make” tools additionally require CGAL and associated paraphenalia. I have only tested this on Linux.

• g++

• CGAL

• cmake

  apt-get install g++ libcgal-dev cmake

• cffi

  pip install cffi

Demakein has been tested under Linux. Other operating systems may require some alterations to make the C++ compilation system work.

Installation

Easy way

pip install demakein

From source, download and untar tarball then

python setup.py install

You can then run program by typing

demakein

or

python -m demakein

Example

Create a small flute:

demakein design-straight-folk-flute: myflute –transpose 12

demakein make-flute: myflute

Files are created in a directory called myflute.

We’ve just made STL files for 3D printing. How about if we want to CNC-mill the flute?

demakein make-flute: myflute –mill yes –open yes –prefix milling