Rocksolver has been named as one of Australia’s 100 most innovative products in Anthill’s ‘SMART 100′ Index.
Please have a look at our entry and, if you like, vote us up using your Twitter or Facebook ID. Here http://anthillonline.com/rocksolver-optimisation-software-nsw-2014-smart-100/
I’ve just uploaded a new video to Youtube showing the inside and outside of a Rocksolver drystone wall in high definition. You can see it here http://www.youtube.com/user/rocksolver
Looking up at the sky.
Inside the dry stone wall.
A couple of weeks ago our website was hacked and taken down. It’s now being rebuilt on a more secure hosting service at Net Origin, here http://www.intresto.com.au/
The Google search result post-hacking was amusing:
I thought it was funny 🙂
Intresto has been nominated for the Global Cleantech Cluster Association 2013 “Later Stage” Award.
Thanks to John O’Brien from Australian Cleantech for nominating us.
We are in the Waste Management category because Rocksolver can be used to build landscaping from demolition rubble.
This is the best dry stone wall digital model I’ve made so far. It mimics a real dry stone wall which is effectively two retaining walls leaning in on each other.
In a simulated physics test the wall was subject to an impact and you can see in the video (http://youtu.be/i4libtFl_KA) how very little of the impact energy was transmitted along the wall. Only that part of the wall which was directly impacted was damaged.
There’s also a simulation of the wall being destroyed by an earthquake here http://youtu.be/cnx5BoF_Sd4 although this simulation probably doesn’t mimic a real wall under earthquake conditions because the ground movement has not been made to match a real earthquake and the wall doesn’t contain through stones and hearting which would act to dampen the effect of vibration forces. Physics simulation was done in Sketchup using the Sketchyphysics plugin.
Each side of the wall consists of prism-shaped rocks packed according to Rocksolver’s 2D packing algorithm. Have a look at my previous post about how 3D structures like dry stone walls are built by solving a 2D packing problem.
If you’d like a copy of the digital 3D model of this dry stone wall then sign up here http://first-rocksolver-customer.kickoffpages.com/, be a beta tester and I’ll email you the file, for free. Or you can buy it for $20 here http://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/architectural-exterior/landmark/dry-stone-wall–2.
I submitted an application to the Million Pound Startup investment competition for Rocksolver as augmented ability software. The winner gets 1 million pounds investment and the opportunity to work in London to accelerate the growth of the business.
Click on the link below (or on the image above) to go to the Million Pound Startup site. If you want to see my entry you’ll need to register then use the map to find Rocksolver in Armidale. On the Rocksolver entry page you can click on the “Vote to win” button if you like 🙂
Or if you’ve got a startup then put in an entry.
A couple of weeks ago I delivered a Rocksolver-generated layout plan to a local landscape designer. It was for a small area of erosion control so it was just the 2D layout plan that was needed.
Photo from Walter McNiven, Pliesure Scapes landscape design. Rocksolver’s first customer.
One of the editors (Mike Lucey) of the Sketchucation newsletter kindly wrote an article about Rocksolver. It’s in Edition 18 here http://sketchucation.com/all-news/catch-up
Sketcucation has 190,000 members and it’s a community-driven info site for the 30 million users of Sketchup.
Rocksolver is now good enough and fast enough to solve some 2D packing problems like paving.
Below is an example of a Rocksolver layout in the virtual Sketchup world (you can get this model for free from the Intresto collection on 3dwarehouse) and below that a couple of sample solutions to packing irregular-shaped and regular-shaped 2D objects.
If you’d like to take part in the beta testing then get in touch via our contact form (http://www.intresto.com.au/contact-us) and I’ll let you know how the process works.
The world of photogrammetry (or photoscanning) has come a long way in a short time. Last week I took 36 photos of some rocks on a beach in Royal National Park just south of Sydney and used 123D Catch to create a 3D model.
You can see a video of the model from the point of view of a camera flying around it here on YouTube http://youtu.be/ObXFwvEL8JE
A few of the photos and the 3D model displayed in MeshLab are shown below.
The good thing for Rocksolver is that this type of technology can be used to update the shape of the rock structure as it is being built so that cumulative errors are avoided in our rock-packing algorithm.
Rocksolver 