Developed and released in September of 2008, Whack-A-Snack is a children’s museum exhibit installed at the Explorium of Lexington in Lexington, KY. The Explorium approached us asking for an interactive exhibit that got kids moving and thinking about smart eating choices. Developed in partnership with Enomalies (Bill Gregory), Whack-A-Snack has been a tremendous hit with museum patrons.
A while back, I had the need to interpret an STL file (stereolithography), which is the general filetype of choice when dealing with rapid prototyping / 3D printing. My side business at the time had released a free 3D model viewer for the iPad, and we wanted to give estimates on prototyping costs whenever someone uploaded one of their own models. I couldn’t find any reasonable STL parsers that would work server-side, so I decided to make my own. The process of doing that, and the resulting files, are described below.
