2009-02-06 05:01:52 UTC
Recently, I developed an app that generates the perimeters of a thrust plate for a CNC milled stepper motor that I am doing as part of the Reprap project. Rather than write a script to generate the perimeter in AoI, I wrote and debugged it in VB.NET which generated a text file with the coordinates of the vertices of the perimeters and then wrote a quickie tool script to read in the perimeter in AoI. If the design proves successful, I will render the whole thing as an AoI script.
Anyhow, in order to set the perimeters up as solids that can be interpreted I had to do a triangular mesh fill and an extrude followed by a bit of boolean ops to get what I needed. You can get an idea of what I was doing here...
http://www.3dreplicators.com/cgi-bin/cblog/index.php?/archives/503-Pushing-the-limits.html
The perimeters can be seen in the article and specifically, here...
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_pFOm7tEWWu4/SYm_eXWv3oI/AAAAAAAABic/BC7ed-g9z04/s1600/VB%2Bdeliniation%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bthrust%2Bpath%2B01.jpg
As an aside, there appears to be gaps in the rendering of the perimeters. That is an artifact of my quick and dirty graphics in VB.NET. The perimeters are, indeed, closed loops. I checked that very closely.
The solution you see if for a 45 degree step size stepper motor. This was at the upper end of what I could achieve with the Boolean Ops in AoI doing every kind of tweaking that I could think of. In fact, the solids you see here did not generate clean STLs. I had to dial back the step size to 72 degrees (5 steps/360 degrees) before I could generate reliable STLs from the boolean ops.
I noticed that most of the time when I tried to do boolean ops in AoI with more ambitious solids, AoI would just grind for a while after I selected the two solids and invoked boolean ops and then just cleanly exit from the procedure not giving me the little window that shows me the shape and intersection opportunities. The exit was very clean. AoI didn't crash or anything. I could go on and do other things with it without trouble. It just wouldn't do the boolean op and gave me no information whatsoever as to what was lacking.
Any ideas as to what I am missing here?
Thanks.
