Data driven Archimedean spiral in OpenScad and Python

This sculpture of sorts is my attempt at building a physical representation of an input data source. I chose the Archimedean spiral because it is compact and aesthetically pleasing. In this example, I am rendering speed data from a car journey where height represents speed throughout the journey.

OpenScad is not able to read data files directly so it had to be done by creating a library containing the data vector (list of variables). This library file is then imported into the Openscad script and looped through to create the shape.

The workflow is as follows:

1) The original data file is recorded / captured - in this case it is a driving journey from a car where the location and speed are captured every second using a GPS logger. The data source in this example is called "0000000_formatspd.json" and contains just the speed data and date time stamp per second.

2) I then run my Python based converter script called "trip2datascad.py" against this source data file which uses th