Hi Sean,
Thank you for your explanations. Direct editing of objects in Archer would
definitely be a great jump forward, maybe a priority for attracting more CAD
users to BRL-CAD; it was the first thing that I was missing in it.
Concerning 3D printing, I have a 3D printer at my desk available for
experimenting, so if there would be a need from the BRL-CAD community for
testing e.g. the g-gcode exports, I can do the practical tests on it.
I will now install both MSVC and VM versions of BRL-CAD and go through
available tutorials of mged to avoid evident questions.
Regards,
Mike
From: Christopher Sean Morrison [mailto:brl...@mac.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2016 8:49 PM
To: BRL-CAD Developer Mailing List <brlcad-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [brlcad-devel] Newbie to BRL-CAD
On Nov 11, 2016, at 3:32 PM, Michal Hanus <mikeha...@seznam.cz
<mailto:mikeha...@seznam.cz> > wrote:
My name is Mike Hanus, I am a high school student from the Czech Republic and I
would like to join your group for Google Code-In competition.
Welcome Mike, what a great head start getting set up.
I was very pleased to see BRL-CAD as the GCI organization this year because I
use CAD quite frequently for designing hobby robots and 3D printing and I
already wanted to move from "kindergarten" CADs like SketchUp or DesignSpark to
something more hardcore, what BRL-CAD definitely is :).
Ironically, BRL-CAD needs a lot of the usability/simplicity of tools like
SketchUp, so your perspective and work towards making it easier to use it quite
welcome. :)
I am trying to code in C/C++/C#/Qt so I hope that I could be helpful somehow to
your projects. Also, if there is something in BRL-CAD development to test for
STL export to 3D printing, I have a Prusa i3 printer available for experiments.
Great, 3D printing is actually one of the main focus areas I had in mind for
GCI tasks.
We have command line tools (e.g., g-stl and gcv) and mged/archer commands
(e.g., facetize + bot_dump). We also have an experimental g-gcode tool that
bypasses STL entirely.
When you ask if there is something for testing STL export, can you be more
specific? Are you asking if there is a development/automated test suite or are
you asking what the commands/tools are that you can use to check it out?
Beware: export to any polygonal format is very complicated and currently not
robust for even more complicated reasons. We of course want it to be robust,
and many of the tasks I have in mind for GCI are to help with that.
1. What IDE would you recommend for easy compiling BRL-CAD from source
code on Windows 7? I have worked with Visual Studio Professional
2010/2012/2015, Qt creator, Dev-C++, NetBeans, and eclipse (in this order of
preference).
Most of those should work, but we mostly test compilation with MSVC. Getting
BRL-CAD compiling under MingW will be a few GCI tasks if you want a challenge
(it’s mostly learning how to add CMake tests).
2. Is there any benefit in using Virtual Machine image of BRL-CAD as full
IDE compared to “classic” Win 7 IDEs as above? If so, will I be able to update
its version from 7.24 (which is on the BRL-CAD web) to the current 7.26.0.2?
Main benefit being the VM is a Linux environment so you have greater access to
command-line functionality and it’s a well-tested environment. Running outside
a VM will be perfectly adequate and faster too.
4. In Archer, I can translate a position of a primitive object entering
to the “Object edit mode” window but I cannot change its dimensions by direct
entering the values there. Is there any other method how to do it directly in
Archer except by mouse-moving (unprecise) or by switching to MGED – Primitive
Editor (which requires closing the Archer)?
Creating tests for the “edit” command is on our TODO list for GCI. Archer does
not have modes, so things like “sed” and “oed” no longer exist in archer.
5. I found a few bugs when using Archer, where can I report them?
Make sure you’re using an SVN compile of the trunk sources and confirm the bug
there before reporting it. That will not only help confirm it’s not an issue
already fixed, but it’ll mean you have an environment set up to fix it. We
will (retroactively if needed) create GCI tasks for any bugs fixed and there
will be other GCI tasks for identifying and reporting bugs.
Cheers!
Sean
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