Monday - October 24, 2011

Fun With Your Browser

Meanwhile, I took a break to let some of the dust settle, and did a little more of my “continuing education” on truss design. Hey, it’s all online. The ‘net is more than just boobs and sports scores. While poking about to see if a Pratt truss was stronger than a Warren truss (ceteris paribus: yup), I came across this:

Oooh, pretty. It’s the Spruce Peak base lodge at the Stowe Mountain ski resort in Stowe Vermont. It’s an octagonal building that’s completely open on the inside, 80 feet in diameter. The roof is about 30 feet high, not counting the cupola. And it’s all open underneath; the roof is supported by wooden trusses. Warren trusses (equilateral triangles) make up the 8 major rafters, while the upper part of the building is supported by Pratt trusses (right triangles, though the 30-60-90 ones are strongest). There are some neat pictures of it at the truss builder’s homepage, here, plus a bunch of acrobat files that show the detailed design. The 8 truss rafters all come together on a central free hanging column. Splaying is kept in check by a “bent” foot extension of the trusses that extends the column up into the cupola. An 80 foot span from only a 30 foot peak is pretty darn good for wood. Most ancient cathedrals in Europe would have a 60 foot tall roof for that, perhaps even more. So it’s pretty cool. And pretty strong; the roof has to be able to handle a very heavy snow load.

But what was even more cool was that that page has a link to the O2C add-in. This is a little gizmo you can add to your browser that let’s you view and manipulate 3-D graphics files. It was pretty easy to install, and even easier to get Firefox to recognize; just tell Firefox to use Firefox the first time you want to view one of the files, like this:

That passes for file association, and it works fine after that. And work fine it does, though in a limited way. You can zoom in and out (+/-) and you can rotate the image (mouse or cursor keys) around the X and Z axis, but you can’t pan up, down or to the side. What they decide is the center point is what you’re stuck with. Still, it’s pretty neat:

I have no idea how common .o2c files are, but now that I have the add-in up and running, I’ll be on the lookout for more.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/24/2011 at 03:33 PM   
Filed Under: • Computers and Cyberspace • Fun-Stuff •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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