Nicole-o-meter
Made by 8BitsAndAByte / 3D Printing
About the project
How many Nicoles are there in Belgium? Use this awesome 3D-printed map to find out!
Project info
Difficulty: Moderate
Platforms: Autodesk
Estimated time: 2 days
License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA version 4.0 or later (CC BY-SA 4+)
Items used in this project
Story
On the website of the Belgian government, you can find interesting data about the first names of the population. Let's use this data to make a cool data visualisation!
Full project videoData Cleaning
First, we need to clean the data so only the useful bits, the numbers we want to show, remain.
Let's clean!
After attempting to make a Python script to do this, which took forever to filter the data, I ended up doing it manually using the sort & filter functions in Excel. I alphabetically sorted the data by name, and singled out all the Nicoles. After this, I sorted by ZIP code and summarised the number of Nicoles per province.
Look at all those Nicoles!
3D Map Making
Now we have our numbers, we need to make it look pretty on a map!
I used this low-poly map of Belgium to create a nice-looking 2D map in Illustrator.
Once the 2D map was imported in Fusion360, I adjusted the heights of the provinces to match the amount of Nicoles living in that province.
Version 0.1 of the 3D map
For instance, there are 4832 Nicoles living in the province of Antwerp, so the height of the province is 48mm.
3D Printing
3D printing!
Last but not least, it's time to 3D print the map. I ended up printing a number of different versions, and as it's a long print, it's best to start with a smaller version in draft printer settings (learned that the hard way...).
And there we have it, a cool, personalised 3D map!
The Nicole-O-Meter
Credits
8BitsAndAByte
We’re Dane & Nicole, two makers that create tremendously terrible tech, which we happily share with you on our channel! https://www.youtube.com/c/8bitsandabyte
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