Google's latest toy - a review by glatt
 

In their relentless quest for total world domination, Google has recently come out with a free sketching program. I think it is probably the same sketching program they used to create the models of building they have in Google Earth. In fact, you are supposed to be able to create objects with it and then import them into Google Earth.

The software is called SketchUp, and it's pretty neat. I loaded it on my PC at work yesterday. Played with it for a few minutes, and then got really serious with it at lunch today. They have a neat tutorial that takes five minutes, and teaches you how to use the software pretty effectively.

I haven't exhausted its capabilities yet, but I didn't see any easy way to draw a shape of specific demensions, other than to drag your mouse around and hope you can get the right size by trial and error. Since it's so hard to get precisely dimensioned objects, I think this is mostly just a toy.

It's very user friendly for screwing around though. Here is an image of my house. It's close enough that it really looks a LOT like my house, but it's kind of hard to get the dimensions perfect down to an inch or so. That ultimately ruins the usefulness of this software. I was hoping I could use it for designing woodworking projects. It will still be good for ideas, but not really good enough for making dimensioned drawings.

Enough rambling. Here's the house I made in about one hour or so. This is where I live.

Holy cow.

I must have it.

Oh, and in case my post wasn't clear, these are models. 3-D objects you can spin around and look at from different angles. Walk through, and look at from the inside.

[drool] mmmm... free [/drool]

Cool... downloading now.

Wow, looks cool! Nice house...

glatt,

Specifying Line Length

Also, you can go to Window, Preferences, Template, and select "Woodworking".

We've already used it here to plan the installation of antennas for our amateur radio stations. Very nice. And the ability to use Google Earth data as the basis for a model rocks.

Thanks! I need to go back and play with that some more.

glatt, is that you in the foreground? You seem much taller when you post.
:)

heres my house.

http://img487.imageshack.us/img487/8697/myhouse3ng.jpg

Nice job, Kagen.

Is that round thing on the deck in back a hot tub or something?

Shark pit....sharks with frickin lasers. :lol:

It sure is addictive. I'm working on a model of 30th Street Station. Why, I'm not exactly sure...

Previously you were considering a Ham antenna. What happened to that and what frequencies? Is there neighbor opposition - existing or potential? I don't see an antenna on that picture.

(2 weeks late with reply)

no, garden.


i bet that was worth waiting for

Awesome!
A garden!!

Yes. It was well worth it. :)

It's up. The 3D model I posted wasn't the one my lifepartner used; my HF and satellite antennas are already up. The antenna is an offset-fed wire dipole, good on 80m through 10m as I recall...so the frequencies would be roughly 4 MHz though 28 MHz.
No. And since we're not subject to C&Rs here, even if there was there wouldn't be much they could do.

That offset dipole - also called a Zep - is featured in a Reading PA WWII airfield and encampment reenactment. In WWII, the offsett dipoles used a ladder line - 600 ohm impedance - where the ground wire did not attach to the antenna.

I was never familiar with Zep antennas. In the Canadian camp, a ham had an interesting setup using principles common in WWII. He explained the concept of tuning antenna impedance by moving the offset. It just never occurred to me that impedance could be tuned by simply shifting the offset. Also interesting his how he support the antenna so high using interconnected fiberglass poles (similar to what is now used on tents) AND adjust zep offset from the ground.

Show is soon; the first weekend of June. It had many ham operators using WWII style techniques and equipment - and lots of old guns and planes.

Some are using flagpoles as a support for the dipole that will not 'offend' neighbors. However, I always thought a J antenna inside a fiberglass flagpole would be a rather interesting way of doing an omnidirectional antenna discretely. Have never seen one. But then they would be discrete.

Satellite as in communication via amateur satellites on 145 and 435 Mhz, or just Geosynchronous conventional satellite receiever?

Of course a true Zepp is end-fed, by definition. They're called that because they were originally developed for use as trailing-wire antennas on dirigibles.

We had a nice dual-band J-pole made from copper pipe on our balcony when we were living in an apartment. Gwennie painted it with brick-texture spray paint and set it in a big flower pot and it was freaking invisible. We also had Moxxon squares built into woven-wood privacy screens, and had used a slingshot to loft magnet wire Zepps into the nearby trees...also invisible. Stealth antennas are an art. But we don't need to be invisible anymore.

Now that's a nice high gain (Yagi?) antenna. Ever try for signals from the Mars satellites? I have seen home brew creations for that, but yours looks like it has even better gain. 15? elements on the 400+ Mhz antenna with both verticle and horizontal polarization.

Yagi with circular polarization. Never tried for the Mars sats; the pointing accuracy probably isn't really up to that kind of work.

"Spiny Norman" satellite antenna array: on Yaesu G-5400-B az-el rotor
2m: 20 element CP yagi (Cushcraft A144-20T) 11.1 dBd gain
70cm: 30 element 70cm CP yagi (Hygain 7030SAT) 14dBdc gain
2.4GHz: Millicom S-band RX downconverter, 27dB gain, 3db NF 18-turn K5OE helix

Been trying to understand the underlying purpose of Google Sketchup. If used as a preliminary package to enhance existing or future Google products, then I understand why Sketchup would be free. For example, use MaggieL's 30th Street Station as the preliminary sketches to design a building (and maybe it's decorating) AND then feed that data into a decorator software package or an AutoCAD architects package. But Sketchup does not seem to do that. It features a proprietary data file.

Sketchup does not seem to 'feed' other products. It does offer some connection to import from Google Earth. But I don't get it. What is (or might be) Google's intent with this free software package?

The Pro version exports models in 3DS, DWG, DXF, OBJ, XSI, VRML, and FBX file formats It also exports animations and walkthroughs as MOV or AVI files. I've already imported stuff from Blender as 3DS. The user interface is *vastly* easier to use than Blender's. You can also export models from the free version to a service Google runs for sharing them.

http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/5224/house0jo.jpg

http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/4306/coffee4tt.jpg

You're not supposed to see the hook, only the bait. :D

The roof of 30th St. station was designed to be load-bearing to allow small aircraft to land...probably at the urging of Harold Pitcairn, (early developer along with Juan de la Cierva) of the autogyro and airmail advocate.

(This is his airmail aeroplane design)http://aerofiles.com/pit-pa5.jpg

Today, derivatives of the V-22 Osprey might take their place implementing one heckuva commuter service.

nice mug. or oddly shaped and unclean pool