De Zelfmaker
De Zelfmaker maintains and helps people with using the softare that Bas Wijnen writes. This page describes some of these programs. Please contact us if you have any questions.
Franklin is a collection of programs that allows full control of a CNC robot, such as a 3-D printer: the firmware in the microcontroller, the software on the mini computer in the machine and the web interface that is shown to the user.
The main difference between Franklin and other control software is its focus on science: through the API it is very easy to use the robot in an experimental setup, where it is just one part of the components that need to be controlled.
Another important feature is the ability to change settings while the machine is running. This makes it much easier to calibrate it. With other software the user would typically need to repeatedly change a setting and restart the machine to check the result of that change.
Finally, the code the the machine geometry (such as cartesian, delta, polar, etc.) is modular, which makes it very easy to add support for a new type.
This is a visual novel engine for educators. Visual novels are video games that tell a story with occasional choices for the player. The story mostly consists of dialogue. They are mostly popular by fans of Japanese art, and most games are placed in that country. Most of them are about love and relationships, and sex is a common topic. It will be no surprise that many adolescents like these games.
Because of this, the format is attractive for teaching. That is the goal of Lesverhaal. While the students are playing a game which mixes relationships with theory, they learn about a subject.
Unlike the usual plaform for visual novels, Ren'Py, Lesverhaal uses a central server to store information about the players. The teacher can use this to keep track of the progress of their students.
An important downside of such a server is that student information is shared with the provider of that server. That is usually unwanted and sometimes even illegal. Privacy is very important to De Zelfmaker. Because of this, Lesverhaal allows a school, or even an individual teacher, to run their own server. That way there is no need to send any information about the players the De Zelfmaker or anyone else.
Currently there are no complete games available. However, the program is still usable for homework, or example. And of course teachers can write their own games, if they want to and have time for it.
If you are interested in a game about a certain subject, please contact us.
This is a framework for creating multi player games that can be played over the internet using a web browser. Several example board games are also available.
A game consists of Python code that defines the game rules and JavaScript code that defines the interface. Webgame makes everything else work.
To build the interface, Webgame usesM.Grl, which makes it easy to support both 2-D and 3-D interfaces.
After playing and makeing computer games for years, Bas has analyzed some old games for the MSX computer. This gives interesting insights into how games were made back then. He made a video on YouTube about his work on The Maze Of Galious.
Taking medication, eating on time, or making homework? So many things that need to be done every day, which brings with it a new chance every day to forget them. This can be a huge struggle, especially for people who have ADHD. Stella can help with that.
Stella is an app for Android in which you list all repeating activities. Then when it is time, Stella will give you a short notification. Because it is short, you don't need to disable or snooze it right away, as you would for a normal alarm. You should only do that after you have actually done the activity. As long as you have not disabled it, it will give a new notification every minute.
Stella has a very powerful (but because of that also a little complex) way to set up repeat patterns. This makes just about everything possible. You need the alarm to trigger every third wednesday of every even month? Stella can do that.
Stella can also record when activities were done (or skipped). This feature allows you to share this data with your doctor, for example. Or to get an overview for yourself. Stella protects your privacy: while you can choose to share the information, Stella will never share anything on its own.
OpenSCAD is a very nice program for making 3-D models that can be built on a 3-D printer. But for more complex designs, it has two major downsides: it does not allow storing objects in variables, which means that unreadable constructs are required to do some things, and aligning different parts of an assembly is very hard, which leads to errors in the final result.
Cadoo solves these problems. It is a program that lets you define OpenSCAD objects. These can be combined, while using points on both objects to align them. OpenSCAD is used to show the resulting 3-D model while it is being built, and it can also be used to generate output that is usable for producing the object on a 3-D printer.