[Haskell-cafe] ANN: mecha-0.0.0

[Tom Hawkins]

A few months ago, I started toying with a few alternative pump designs
to power our hydraulic hybrids.  After not being able to secure a ProE
license, I searched for a free solid modeler to sketch out a few
ideas.  To my surprise, their are practically no open source 3D CAD
packages available.  So I created Mecha, DSL for constructive solid
modeling.

Mecha's geometry is based on octrees, which makes it easy to perform
set operations on solids, as well as volumetric calculations such as
center-of-mass, moments of inertia, and of course, total volume.
Drawbacks of octrees include consuming a lot of memory and the loss of
some surface information.  To address the later, Mecha carries forward
surface points and normals to the leaf nodes of the octree to assist
in rendering, such that solids don't look like they're made from a
bunch of LEGOS.

Note this is a very early release.  The only thing Mecha can do at the
moment is draw a pretty blue ball -- well it can also zoom and pan on
a pretty blue ball (mouse wheel).  Establishing a primitive API and
building a primitive library must be finished before Mecha an do
anything useful.

Any comments and suggestions are welcome.

http://tomahawkins.org/