Philippe is a part author, reviewer and author of several authoring tools you can find at his home page.He received the 2008 James Jessiman Memorial Award.

Name:
Philippe Hurbain (Username: Philo)

Age:
55 (as of 2011)

Gender:
Male

Location:
Louvres, France, Europe

History with LDraw:
Philippe left his Dark Ages in 1999 when he bought a MINDSTORMS set for his daughter - and ended up playing with the RIS much more than she did... He discovered LeoCAD at the same time and it remains his favourite tool to document his projects. He beta-tests new versions of LeoCAD as they appear on the source repository beside writing tutorials published on the LeoCAD wiki.

LeoCAD led him to the LDraw community and he soon got involved in part creation. Philo is an active parts reviewer, and recently started authoring of complex parts such as the new PowerFunctions elements.

He also wrote several LDraw utilities, such as a rubber belt generator that was later incorporated into MLCad. In 2007 he started writing tools for parts authors with Isecalc and Intersector that help part authors to compute intersections. The range expanded later with surface generator programs (Coverer, Ytruder, Pathtruder), optimizing tools (Rectifier), pattern projection (SlicerPro)...

Being a fan of Technic and MINDSTORMS, he was one of the few happy beta-testers of the new NXT. Philo is a heavy user of LSynth/LPub creating detailed building instructions for his early NXT creations. He refined the LDraw NXT parts mock-ups to place them on Parts Tracker.

He then mixed his LDraw and Mindstorms interests again to create a NXT-based 3D-scanner. He uses it to model complex shaped LDraw parts such as Fabuland figure heads.

Related interests:
An electronic engineer by trade, Philippe is also a computer literate but doesn't consider himself a programmer. As he often quotes: "my favourite programming language is the soldering iron".