Hi!
It's been a while I haven't done a nice project. Now, I think I'm on to a nice one modeling-wise.
I want to build a hemispherical speaker, covered with small drivers. I want some nice pattern. I remember that golf ball contest - that's good, but that's waay too many speakers.
So the first thing I did was converting @ulrich1a's Macro Geodesic dome to be parametric, so I can more easily play with it.
https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-macros/pull/41
Having that one done, I went on experimenting. The domes are very nice, but they are made of triangles. Triangles are not the best, they are pretty far from being round. So I tried to make something that closer resembles a dodecahedron, by truncating a dome. Here are some shapes I got:
This one is the first one that looks reasonable. It has quite a bit of wasted surface. But at the same time, it should allow for some room for the speakers to not interfere on the inside. And it has a clear parting plane.
This one is the same as above, but with a bit more truncation. This one is very surface-efficient, but many sides are cut off by quite a bit by the parting plane.
With more facets comes better surface efficiency:
Now this one would be crazy big, and I don't have a large enough 3d printer to print this. But I take a note, this is an interesting design, may work with very small drivers.
That's all for now =) I hope for more progress soon.