Day 261 - Clearance stars

Sometimes with scaled floor plans it is difficult to tell if your setup is crowded or not. To test out the openness of our layout we printed two "clearance stars" to represent an individual's personal space as they moved through the apartment. According to homeplanner.com, for limited access spaces - like passageways behind furniture - a space of 24 inches should be allowed. For high-traffic spaces they suggest a space of 36 inches. But hey, it's a New York City apartment, not a spacious country home, so we took those measurements down a little bit after measuring the minimum comfortable clearances in our current home. We ended up settling on 22 inches clearance for limited access spaces, and 30 inches for high-traffic areas. The star models represent 1:50 scale of six feet tall so you can imagine them sort of as people with extra elbow room poking out all around. Here they are proving that we will be able to fit in the apartment along with all the furniture:

Thingiverse link: http://www.thingiverse.com/make:78720

Settings: MakerBot Replicator 2 at .3mm/low resolution.

Technical notes, OpenSCAD flavor: This model is just a tall twelve-pointed star column with a smaller copy of itself hollowed out of the middle. The star is a union of three (4-pointed, of course) squares, each rotated 120 degrees from the last, with code borrowed from Catarina Mota's shape library:

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// module for clearance star ////////////////////////////////

module 12ptstar(width,height) {
starNum = 3;
starAngle = 360/starNum;
// place StarNum cubes rotated evenly
for (s = [1:starNum]) {
rotate([0, 0, s*starAngle]) cube([width/sqrt(2),width/sqrt(2),height], true);
  }
}

module clearance_star(width,height) {
scale(s)
difference(){
12ptstar(width,height);
12ptstar(width-6,height+2);
}
}

Here are the lines of code for rendering the two stars:

// limited access clearance star 
//clearance_star(width=22,height=72);

// high-traffic access clearance star 
//clearance_star(width=30,height=72);