Beda Vavrena

[Beda Vavrena]

Hi guys. I am an IT professional located in mid Europe. I enjoy constantly inventing something interesting in my free time. I was interested in handmade original objects made of wood and epoxy . At first, I only made them as gifts for my loved ones . But when I saw the enthusiasm of the recipients, I thought that I could make others happy with my products.
Through the production of epoxy tables and coffee tables , and wall clocks, I got to handmade woodturned pens . A special category is the production of very original wall sculptures: digital elements combined with old wood. I am calling that Digital history.
Last but not least, I also do metal casting, knife making, photography, 3D modeling in freeCAD and 3D printing. Some of my creation I need to 3D model to see if I can really make it - like Shrek's bottle.

Many of my creations you can see on my web page: https://vavrena.eu/gallery/
My youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@BedaVavrena/videos (below 100 followers so you can still grab your 2 digits number ;-)

Thank you for checking out
Beda
B-)

 

[Chris Fairbanks]

Beda, Its always good to meet other IT professionals that also enjoy wood turning and 3D printing! Welcome to the forums!

 

[Mark Fairchild]

Interesting and beautiful work Beda! Look forward to seeing more of your creations.

 

[John K Jordan]

Hello Beda! I'm sure you, like me, will find a lot of interesting things on this forum.

Sounds like you have an interesting life!

I retired in 2006 after 15 years of software development for a US national laboratory, then 15 more years of 3D graphics. Taught myself programming in the early 1970s starting with assembly language when if you wanted a computer, you built it yourself, then a bit later learned 3D modeling/animation using the Autodesk 3D studio and 3DS Max, moderating the 3DS forum for Autodesk for years. I used 3DS a lot in designing and illustrating things for woodturning and hobbies, but on the job I did technical and scientific work, often PR to bring in financing for R&D groups within the Lab and the government. Good clean fun, especially since I did most of my work in my basement "dungeon"! I had a 10-processor render farm and it still took days to render some animations. (zounds, computers are SO much faster now!)



Wow, your shop is cleaner and looks more organized than mine was when I first built it!

BTW, we've traveled to many places in Europe but the closest we ever got to Slovakia was Austria. Should we plan a visit to your country? (Our son is in Poland this week.)

JKJ

 

[Beda Vavrena]

Hello Beda! I'm sure you, like me, will find a lot of interesting things on this forum.

Sounds like you have an interesting life!

I retired in 2006 after 15 years of software development for a US national laboratory, then 15 more years of 3D graphics. Taught myself programming in the early 1970s starting with assembly language when if you wanted a computer, you built it yourself, then a bit later learned 3D modeling/animation using the Autodesk 3D studio and 3DS Max, moderating the 3DS forum for Autodesk for years. I used 3DS a lot in designing and illustrating things for woodturning and hobbies, but on the job I did technical and scientific work, often PR to bring in financing for R&D groups within the Lab and the government. Good clean fun, especially since I did most of my work in my basement "dungeon"! I had a 10-processor render farm and it still took days to render some animations. (zounds, computers are SO much faster now!)

View attachment 75836

Wow, your shop is cleaner and looks more organized than mine was when I first built it!

BTW, we've traveled to many places in Europe but the closest we ever got to Slovakia was Austria. Should we plan a visit to your country? (Our son is in Poland this week.)

JKJ

Hi John,
seems we have similar history. I m also tried to learn Assembler on Commodore +/4, just bit later than you, in 1986 ;-)
Also was first in Czechoslovakia to make CAD/CAE diploma work on Prague university in 1993 and then was lecturer of I-DEAS sw = CAD/CAM/CAE for couple of years.
Then I concentrated only to IT and get back to 3D modeling and 3D printing just 5 yrs ago, after Corona strikes.
I am also traveling a bit, returned from holidays in Mauritius last week and just now I am in Vienna Airport again, heading to Germany.
Good to see Slovakia, but anyhow we are going skiing often to Austria or better in Dolomiti Italy.

Just logged in. Going to be bit more familiar with this AAW association

Cheers

Beda

 

[Beda Vavrena]

Interesting and beautiful work Beda! Look forward to seeing more of your creations.

Thank you Mark. I am looking here for most complex ideas ... to try them replicate at home ;-)
Beda

 

[Beda Vavrena]

Beda, Its always good to meet other IT professionals that also enjoy wood turning and 3D printing! Welcome to the forums!

Thank you Chris, seems IT, 3D and wood come together more often than I thought ;-)
I am always trying to learn something new. Hope here I will get ideas for most complicated setup....currently thinking to turn Dart Wader ship able to hold 2 alcohols ;-)

Where is your IT background? (I am something like cloud architect and Project Manager in Deutsche Telekom)

Cheers
Beda
B-)

 

[John K Jordan]

I m also tried to learn Assembler on Commodore +/4, just bit later than you, in 1986 ;-)

I never used a Commodore - I put together a kit from SWTPC and had to learn 6800 assembler since there were no compilers available.

I bought an old clunky Teletype with a paper tape punch/reader, and hand-converted assembly code into hex and entered it one byte at a time. Make one mistake - crash! I could punch out a tape with my code so I didn't have to enter it again. The first program was tic-tac-toe. Later, a Basic language interpreter became available - I think it took almost an hour to load each time from the paper tape! I eventually got a 8" floppy disk drive with 1.2mb storage then later a HUGE 10MB HDD! Wow!

Even in the '70s there were bulletin boards accessible through dialup modem so I made a 110baud modem for the teletype and was able talk to other people. And play Adventure, repeatedly printing out the scene descriptions on paper as I stumbled through the maze. What an experience.

In 1979 someone in Tennessee started publishing little magazine called the 68' Micro Journal which was a lifesaver!
https://deramp.com/downloads/swtpc/...dcasting)/Manuals/68 Micro-Journal Feb 79.pdf
I even had a few articles published.

At some point I upgraded to the screaming 6809 processor and started designing and building interface hardware for the computer. I learned how draw and etch circuit boards and made interface hardware and A/D and D/A converters and could record and create music and weird sounds. Since the SWTPC didn't even have a time-of-day clock I used someone's idea to connect a digital watch to interface hardware and load the time and date when turning the computer on:



I eventually built a CRT display and a low-res graphics output board and wrote my own 3D "flight simulator" program - actually it had no airplane physics but allowed me to move around and through a simple 3D scene of shapes, entered one coordinate a a time. I stole the matrix math by disassembling an early SubLogics program. What a thrill!

All this was fun but it gave me an easy path to good work in software development and later to the 3D graphics work.

I loved the jobs - but now I REALLY love being retired - playing in the shop, raising animals and birds, playing in the dirt, and lots of travel.

Hey, do you go to northern Italy a lot? We've been many times - we stay with friends in Maran/Marano, low terrain with hot springs and palm trees surrounded by snow-covered mountains! And relatively few tourists - a man at the post office told me I was the first person from the USA he had ever met! Beautiful part of the world. And there are good trains to Switzerland, Germany, and the rest of Italy. Maybe we could meet up some time.

JKJ