This is a tool for making art and getting calculations from geodesic domes.
Geodesics domes were popularized by the visionary American polymath, R. Buckminster Fuller. Throughout his life, Fuller worked on technologies that can improve life for all inhabitants of Spaceship Earth. These ideas are thoroughly explored in his seminal work, Synergetics. These domes are one of the most efficient ways to create an enclosed space with the least amount of building materials. They embody what Fuller calls "ephemeralization", or doing more with less, an important principle for living on planet with finite resources.
Updates (December 2024)
Added a bunc h of new features latlely, including displaying unique polyygons for each geodesic sphere and a function to fix rounding errors.
On the rhombuses. Only v1 is truly rhombic. i have not figured out how to flatten the rhombuses in the higher frequencies.. yet.
I'm putting all the 3d geodesic functions in a separate javascript library - geo3d - so it's easier for other people to use.
oh! i figured out how to do a Kruschke dome after going over some documents provided by Gerry Toorney on Geodesic Help google group. Just 3v and 4v triangles for now, it seems to break a lot of the other shape calcs i have.
January 2025
I figured out a general method for creating Kruschke geodesic subdivisions of any frequency. Also implemented the grid so you can see how the vertices are created. Notice how at higher frequencies, the planar slices do not intersect at a single point. We get around this issue by picking the two small circles that are planar and not using the third one, depending on which side of the primary triangle we're working from. We also need "round out" the corners, because they will get increasingly compressed as the frequency increases. This problem is even worse for the octa and tetra. Note: as well the Mexican method, Kruschke methods produces struts that are not geodesic (i.e., the shortest path between two points on a sphere).