From: Gene H. <ghe...@wd...> - 2012-08-10 06:10:26
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Greetings all; 1.Where, in the preferences is the on screen scaling set and the dimension display enabled? It doesn't do me any good to draw something that is dimensionless. 2.How does one edit a square and get it to redraw as a rectangle? 3.Does it export a format PyCAM understands and can convert to gcode to carve the part? Thank you. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up! Truthful, adj.: Dumb and illiterate. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
From: Gene H. <ghe...@wd...> - 2012-08-10 16:17:50
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On Friday 10 August 2012 12:11:17 Gene Heskett did opine: > Greetings all; > > 1.Where, in the preferences is the on screen scaling set and the > dimension display enabled? It doesn't do me any good to draw something > that is dimensionless. > > 2.How does one edit a square and get it to redraw as a rectangle? > > 3.Does it export a format PyCAM understands and can convert to gcode to > carve the part? > > Thank you. > > Cheers, Gene A PS if you will. The tutorials need flashplayer, which is actually installed, the last linux version, and although firefox can see it just fine in its about:plugins screen, it doesn't seem to be working. I hit several sites that think I don't have it installed, and your builtin viewer for the tutorials also complains, so I appear to be locked out of the tutorials for freecad. This is ubuntu-10.04.4 LTS, totally uptodate. A similar message is also posted to ubuntu-users. Thanks. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up! The first condition of immortality is death. -Stanislaw Lec |
From: Andy H. <an...@ga...> - 2012-08-10 17:48:46
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Gene, > > A PS if you will. The tutorials need flashplayer, which is actually > installed, the last linux version, and although firefox can see it just > fine in its about:plugins screen, it doesn't seem to be working. I hit > several sites that think I don't have it installed, and your builtin viewer > for the tutorials also complains, so I appear to be locked out of the > tutorials for freecad. > > This is ubuntu-10.04.4 LTS, totally uptodate. > > A similar message is also posted to ubuntu-users. > I've had problems with flash under ubuntu-10.04 before. Clicking in the video frame and doing 'refesh' generally takes care of it. The videos I found were on youtube, which play fine. http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Video_tutorials Andy |
From: Gene H. <ghe...@wd...> - 2012-08-11 00:03:34
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On Friday 10 August 2012 19:52:10 Andy Howell did opine: > Gene, > > > A PS if you will. The tutorials need flashplayer, which is actually > > installed, the last linux version, and although firefox can see it > > just fine in its about:plugins screen, it doesn't seem to be working. > > I hit several sites that think I don't have it installed, and your > > builtin viewer for the tutorials also complains, so I appear to be > > locked out of the tutorials for freecad. > > > > This is ubuntu-10.04.4 LTS, totally uptodate. > > > > A similar message is also posted to ubuntu-users. > > I've had problems with flash under ubuntu-10.04 before. Clicking in the > video frame and doing 'refesh' generally takes care of it. > > The videos I found were on youtube, which play fine. > Now they also play fine here, but only IN FIREFOX after my screwing around just now, but not in freecad, which cannot find the flashplayer. I took a screen snapshot as Snapshot.png, in the Genes-os9-stf/GCode subdir of my web page in the sig below. Thanks Andy. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up! Fortune favors the lucky. |
From: Yorik v. H. <yor...@gm...> - 2012-08-18 03:13:49
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Hi Gene, Sorry about the late reply Your 2 questions are a bit vague, I'm not sure how to answer. By scaling do you mean zooming? About dimensions, they are not enabled or disabled, you need to add them manually, being in the sketcher or the draft workbench. About the squares, it depends on how they are created (sketcher or draft). In any case, you'd probably better have a look at the documentation: https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page About pycam, i don't know which formats it uses, but FreeCAD exports to many well-known formats (step, iges, obj, dxf, etc..), surely there is one that works. Hope it helps! Cheers Yorik |
From: Gene H. <ghe...@wd...> - 2012-08-18 12:42:09
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On Saturday 18 August 2012 06:55:51 Yorik van Havre did opine: > Hi Gene, > > Sorry about the late reply > > Your 2 questions are a bit vague, I'm not sure how to answer. By scaling > do you mean zooming? About dimensions, they are not enabled or > disabled, you need to add them manually, being in the sketcher or the > draft workbench. I expected that a menu would appear on the left side of the screen when I had added a line/circle/box, one that would allow the editing of the dimensions, but while a menu did appear that looked like it was editable for colors etc, no dimensions were listed. So it was not possible to specify that the box was to be 34mm long, 22mm high, which was to be extruded to 22mm thick eventually. Those figures are arbitrary of course, picked out of thin air, but what I wanted to do was to draw a cage for a ball nut, which is for an 8mm by 2.5mm pitch ball screw. It is intended to mount on the bottom of the cross feed table of my lathe. The nut itself is round, .750 inches in diameter, and .675 inches long. I have it partially carved on my milling machine now, but have made no more progress since last Tuesday when the owner of our local radio station came by and asked me to go take a look at his main transmitter since that is what I have been doing for a living since '62. Chasing electrons & making them do useful work for a living since 1948. The transmitter is about 60 years old, and not well cared for, so its list of problems reads like a restaurant menu. Rapid fixing is compounded by the scarcity of parts for such an ancient unit. I replaced a 200pf, 5kv tested, 1.2 amps of current rated mica capacitor in the final's driver stage yesterday which I suspected of opening up when hot, detuning the circuit. So it is back on the air, but the 833C's in the modulator are tired so it isn't modulating well. A fresh set of those should be here next Monday. > About the squares, it depends on how they are created > (sketcher or draft). ISTR I had tried both methods, but got into an 'I need an undo' state which could not be exited by any method except sending freecad a kill -9 as the normal exit was denied, claiming to be in an incompleted edit mode. After the update since I wrote that, freecad now works to display the online html docs, it did not before, but I wasn't able to find a back button to get back to the screen I was working on, and was again only terminatable with a kill -9. I find, at my age (77), that is so distracting that it over rides my train of thought. Running two copies on separate workspace screens might be handy but I've not tried that yet. > In any case, you'd probably better have a look at the documentation: > https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Pag > e That page is advertising version 0.12. Since I am getting version 0.13's fresh builds about 2x a week from the update manager, it strikes me as having the potential to be outdated. Not having a place to enter the part dimensions right up front seems to me like a huge oversight. I can probably work, and should be working from the micrometer measurements I can take from the actual part I'm trying to build a mounting wrapper for even if I have to manually translate that .750 diameter from inches to mm's to do it, but with no place to do it in the freecad menu system, it is of very little utility, so I am writing the gcode to build this on a cut by cut basis, doing all my cutting bit diameter compensations as I go. Relocating the part in the vice when I have to present a new face as the top to do the next operation is likely to be a problem, and that is the next 2 steps, cutting out the sides of the cage so that the cage can be flexed enough to be driven over the nut, then closed back up enough to grab it. With little or no lengthwise play allowed, since if there is, I'll have to drill and tap one end of it for setscrews to eliminate that play since it will translate directly into backlash that LinuxCNC will have to compensate for. > About pycam, i don't know which formats it uses, but FreeCAD exports to > many well-known formats (step, iges, obj, dxf, etc..), surely there is > one that works. PyCAM can surely work with one of those. But I know nothing about python. In years past I have written lots of code, but in native assembly for smaller cpus, 1802, Z-80 and the 6809/6309, or in C, and most recently since the hardware is gotten wider data over the last 30 years, even in bash. But lisp-like languages such as python have eluded my mental grasp. Old dogs, new tricks syndrome I guess. > Hope it helps! Hopefully I will have the time to explore it more later today, its early for me yet so the instant error is $ENOTENOUGHCOFFEE. What I am hoping to do here is to relate to you folks who are intimately familiar with this, the problems a total newbie who pretty much has a mental picture of what he wants to do, while trying to translate that mental picture into something I can both print out in 2d views with dimensions of every line or pair of faces noted, and if possible, actually have the gcode written by PyCAM. Usable by a newbee who has never seen autocad run should be the documentations major target. You do have a 'start' button/mode that looks like its defined, but what does one do next? That is the sort of documentation help a rank newbee needs, but I'm not finding it. The biggest problem with PyCAM and its ilk is that the gcode generators I have tried to use so far, all "unroll" what obviously can be done with a conditional loop, generating tens of thousands of lines of code, where by using named variables and conditional loops and or named subroutines, I can do that directly in gedit, vim etc, in 50 lines of code that on my little machine might take 36 hours to run. Not to mention that to fix an errant dimension in my gcode is a single named variable edit & rerun the code. Such code generators as I've tried to use so far are idiotically simple as they don't use named variables and it is simply not practical to go through an 80k LOC file changing the value for the Y dimension in every 4th line of code when that value is being incremented by .010" or less for every time that move is encountered. So automatic gcode generators have a long way to go yet to 'get there' IMO. > Cheers > Yorik Thank you Yorik. Off to find some coffee & something for breakfast. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up! There appears to be irrefutable evidence that the mere fact of overcrowding induces violence. -- Harvey Wheeler |
From: Lars O. G. <gr...@gm...> - 2012-08-18 13:12:33
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Hi Gene, hi Yorik! > I expected that a menu would appear on the left side of the screen when I > had added a line/circle/box, one that would allow the editing of the > dimensions, but while a menu did appear that looked like it was editable > for colors etc, no dimensions were listed. So it was not possible to > specify that the box was to be 34mm long, 22mm high, which was to be > extruded to 22mm thick eventually. Those figures are arbitrary of course, > picked out of thin air, but what I wanted to do was to draw a cage for a > ball nut, which is for an 8mm by 2.5mm pitch ball screw. It is intended to > mount on the bottom of the cross feed table of my lathe. The nut itself is > round, .750 inches in diameter, and .675 inches long. I think you are looking for the data tab of the properties window. It is all there. You just need to switch between the two tabs (view/data) from time to time. See the screenshot here: http://static.larsgrobe.de/freecad.png I just have metric units set in my document, so this would need to be scaled when working in other units. Cheers, Lars. |
From: Gene H. <ghe...@wd...> - 2012-08-18 14:03:20
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On Saturday 18 August 2012 09:56:56 Lars O. Grobe did opine: > Hi Gene, hi Yorik! > > > I expected that a menu would appear on the left side of the screen > > when I had added a line/circle/box, one that would allow the editing > > of the dimensions, but while a menu did appear that looked like it > > was editable for colors etc, no dimensions were listed. So it was > > not possible to specify that the box was to be 34mm long, 22mm high, > > which was to be extruded to 22mm thick eventually. Those figures are > > arbitrary of course, picked out of thin air, but what I wanted to do > > was to draw a cage for a ball nut, which is for an 8mm by 2.5mm pitch > > ball screw. It is intended to mount on the bottom of the cross feed > > table of my lathe. The nut itself is round, .750 inches in diameter, > > and .675 inches long. > > I think you are looking for the data tab of the properties window. It is > all there. You just need to switch between the two tabs (view/data) from > time to time. See the screenshot here: > > http://static.larsgrobe.de/freecad.png That is I believe, more icons on the toolbar than I have seen, and while I believe I have seen that left pane, only the lines colors were editable, no H/W/L lines were displayed. Is there a prefs editor option to control that? > I just have metric units set in my document, so this would need to be > scaled when working in other units. My mill, running LinuxCNC can be measurement mode switched and can digest metric measurements as easily as inch. I just need to remember to put those 2 or 3 gcode commands in the top of my source file. Its my inch trained mind that is a bigger problem. :) > > Cheers, Lars. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > ------ Live Security Virtual Conference > Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and > threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. > Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the > latest in malware threats. > http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ > _______________________________________________ > Free-cad-general mailing list > Fre...@li... > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/free-cad-general Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up! Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I'll cry in anguish, "Mistake!! Mistake!!" |
From: Gene H. <ghe...@wd...> - 2012-08-18 16:20:49
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On Saturday 18 August 2012 11:36:38 Gene Heskett did opine: Sort of a PS to the previous message. > > http://static.larsgrobe.de/freecad.png > > That is I believe, more icons on the toolbar than I have seen, and while > I believe I have seen that left pane, only the lines colors were > editable, no H/W/L lines were displayed. Is there a prefs editor > option to control that? I just found it I think. First I drew a cylinder to represent the nut's outer dimensions. Then I tried to lay it down so the the horizontal axis of the cylinder was the x axis. No can do, and eventually the gfx disconnected from the data I entered as I looked for the magic twanger that would rotate it 90 degrees from vertical. About the same time, the rest of the data in the left pane disappeared except for the dimensions, which do not do anything. So I quit and restarted, but I can't do anything, all actions in all menu's are greyed out now. After several restarts, I finally drew a cylinder, assigned its size (sort of, 2 digits right of the decimal point really isn't enough when I'm needing an interference fit), and after figuring out that I, looking at it from my chair, was looking down the same y axis I would be seeing if standing in front of the mill (duh) got it to lay down. Then I chose the save-as option and saved it in samples as ball-nut. About 1.5 seconds later, freecad apparently did a clean exit. Hummmm. So now I want to be able to load that as an immutable object, and then proceed to draw the cage I am carving around it, in intimate contact with it. > > I just have metric units set in my document, so this would need to be > > scaled when working in other units. Someone said a few days ago that it was metric only, since we in the USA are about the last inch holdouts on the planet. Serves us right. :) It is an impediment to me, but not a show stopper by any means. > My mill, running LinuxCNC can be measurement mode switched and can > digest metric measurements as easily as inch. I just need to remember > to put those 2 or 3 gcode commands in the top of my source files. Its > my inch trained mind that is a bigger problem. :) > > > Cheers, Lars. Thank you, Lars. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up! Office Automation: The use of computers to improve efficiency in the office by removing anyone you would want to talk with over coffee. |
From: Lars O. G. <gr...@gm...> - 2012-08-18 15:09:02
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Hi Gene! > That is I believe, more icons on the toolbar than I have seen, and while I > believe I have seen that left pane, only the lines colors were editable, no > H/W/L lines were displayed. Is there a prefs editor option to control > that? It is not a preference, but a view setup. The different views/workbenches are part of the core concept in Freecad. On the screenshot, I had all toolsbars (menu view/toolbars) switched on plus the tree view and combo view (menu/views). Cheers, Lars. |
From: Gene H. <ghe...@wd...> - 2012-08-18 16:23:06
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On Saturday 18 August 2012 12:21:10 Lars O. Grobe did opine: > Hi Gene! > > > That is I believe, more icons on the toolbar than I have seen, and > > while I believe I have seen that left pane, only the lines colors > > were editable, no H/W/L lines were displayed. Is there a prefs > > editor option to control that? > > It is not a preference, but a view setup. The different > views/workbenches are part of the core concept in Freecad. On the > screenshot, I had all toolsbars (menu view/toolbars) switched on plus > the tree view and combo view (menu/views). > > Cheers, Lars. I think I might have figured that out, is this a savable preference? Thanks, Lars. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up! DIDI ... is that a MARTIAN name, or, are we in ISRAEL? |