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Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

blog.lacebark.io

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Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#51

Post by sehugg »

krick wrote: post #15

I wonder which tools use people making real things with CNC machines. I assume that there's some specific, not really friendly file format which cannot be edited in some 3dMax or Blender, so some conversion is performed before, but, anyway, there must be some more or less standard workflow, I suppose.

You usually generate a "toolpath" which is a set of instructions for the machine to follow. For old MakerBots this was .gcode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-code) which is the exact instructions to control the toolhead. It's a standard insomuch as XML is a standard, that is, format but not content is standardized.

The pros use something like SolidWorks and STEP or IGES to export to CAM.

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#52

Post by angersock »

mfisher87 wrote: post #48
CognitiveLens wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zealotry? It's one comment in an article dealing almost entirely with other issues. Github has become the de-facto place to put code that you want others to work with, and it is a platform built to surface such projects and make them accessible in a consistent way. It's not the only such tool, but it is really familiar to a lot of people, and that makes collaboration slightly easier for those who are familiar with it…

>"Github has become the de-facto place to put code that you want others to work with," I think maybe you meant to use a more general term like "source control" here. Because that's so wrong to say github is de-facto for collaboration. There are proprietary projects with their own source control everywhere and "not using github" is no concern for any of them. Source control came around long before source control front…

Let's not mince words.

Where else is that code being written, and what is it's volume of code compared to Github?

SourceForge? CPAN? The OpenBSD CVS? Bitbucket? Google Code (lol)?

I'd be genuinely surprised if you could show me a place with more repositories right now than Github--I'd love to see such a vibrant ecosystem!

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#53

Post by Animats »

Most of the people commenting here haven't used those tools.

In a modern CAD system, like SolidWorks and Autodesk Inventor, the systems retain much more than geometry. There's lots of structure. "This is a round hole" (STL doesn't even have that.) "This part is a 6/32 screw, pan head, 3/4 inch length". "This edge of this part aligns with this other edge of this other part" "This part is made of mild steel". "This subassembly is made of these parts and is used in these larger assemblies". "The holes in this part are projected downward from the larger assembly so the holes will line up".

All the serious CAD systems today understand those kinds of things. An object is represented as a series of operations in constructive solid geometry, not a mesh. Relationships between parts are modeled. Many parts are parametric - some dimensions depend on other dimensions, and you can change one and have the others change appropriately. ("Appropriately" means this is more than scaling; making the thing longer doesn't turn round holes into ellipses.)

Capturing all that structure is complicated. Open Cascade doesn't do any of that stuff; it's just a geometry library.

Revision control for models is available. Autodesk has Autodesk Vault. Solidworks has Workgroup PDM. Revisions can be compared visually. It's a hard problem, and errors tend to have serious consequences, which is why most engineering shops have a rather rigid workflow.

Over in the animation world, there's Alienbrain, a very expensive revision control system for big animation and game projects. There, you have many different formats to coordinate - video, background art, motion capture data, textures, etc., with different people working on each.

These tools are expensive because the market isn't that big but the value they add is large.

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#54

Post by raverbashing »

angersock wrote: post #52
mfisher87 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Github has become the de-facto place to put code that you want others to work with," I think maybe you meant to use a more general term like "source control" here. Because that's so wrong to say github is de-facto for collaboration. There are proprietary projects with their own source control everywhere and "not using github" is no concern for any of them. Source control came around long before source control front…

Let's not mince words. Where else is that code being written, and what is it's volume of code compared to Github? SourceForge? CPAN? The OpenBSD CVS? Bitbucket? Google Code (lol)? I'd be genuinely surprised if you could show me a place with more repositories right now than Github--I'd love to see such a vibrant ecosystem!

No Linux distribution uses github. Same for FreeBSD/OpenBSD

The Linux Kernel is there but development is not done there, it's merely a mirror.

Gnome (https://git.gnome.org/browse/), KDE, XFCE (http://git.xfce.org/) are not there.

Nginx? Uses Mercurial http://nginx.org/en/download.html Apache? Not there as well

Gcc? LLvm? http://llvm.org/docs/GettingStarted.html#checkout

But the latest fad.js is in github so that's what people use, right?

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#55

Post by angersock »

raverbashing wrote: post #54
angersock wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not mince words. Where else is that code being written, and what is it's volume of code compared to Github? SourceForge? CPAN? The OpenBSD CVS? Bitbucket? Google Code (lol)? I'd be genuinely surprised if you could show me a place with more repositories right now than Github--I'd love to see such a vibrant ecosystem!

No Linux distribution uses github. Same for FreeBSD/OpenBSD The Linux Kernel is there but development is not done there, it's merely a mirror. Gnome ( https://git.gnome.org/browse/ ), KDE, XFCE ( http://git.xfce.org/ ) are not there. Nginx? Uses Mercurial http://nginx.org/en/download.html Apache? Not there as well Gcc? LLvm? http://llvm.org/docs/GettingStarted.html#checkout But the latest fad.js is in github so that'…

So, you've listed like 5-10 projects, scattered across several services. Big projects which are important, don't get me wrong--but still outnumbered by the huge number of your "fad.js" projects.

So, thanks for making my point I guess?

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#56

Post by kanzure »

rjsw wrote: post #50
ChuckMcM wrote: post #13

One of the more interesting things about 3D printing is that it is igniting this sort of issue. A long time ago (like 1991) I was a working for Sun and representing them at the "CAD Framework Initiative" efforts or CFI. The express goal of this was to create a set of interchange formats for CAD tools so that you could move things from one system to another, you could store and diff changes, and even if your vendor we…

Plenty of money and effort was going into STEP [1] in the same timeframe, it is still in use for designing anything that flies. I'm the editor of one of the parts of it and we are seeing increasing interest from other industry sectors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303

> I'm the editor of one of the parts of it

Any thoughts about or contributions to http://stepcode.org/ by any chance?

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#57

Post by jhawkinson »

dugmartin wrote: post #30
jhawkinson wrote: post #9

Many years ago, when I was designing a part in AutoCad, I drew it by hand and then back-converted the drawing into parametrized AutoLISP, which I then stored under version control (RCS at the time). It'd be nice to have tools that make this easy. Though I'm honestly surprised more people don't do it anyhow.

You can version AutoLISP but the output is so verbose (at least for machine generated code) that diffing versions is like diffing PDFs or PCL files. You can see the changes but they don't make any sense without the whole file being rendered. NOTE: Its been 20 years since I used AutoLISP and the code I was using was being generated from software that did cut-plan optimization for lathes so I am probably speaking from…

Huh? The whole point was to version the AutoLISP source, not its output. And I didn't really mean machine-generated code...human-generated.

And of course, as for making sense, well, you have to use good commit logs as well.

But maybe you're talking about some technology that generates AutoLISP from a GUI? I don't know anything about that...

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#58

Post by ultimape »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #13

One of the more interesting things about 3D printing is that it is igniting this sort of issue. A long time ago (like 1991) I was a working for Sun and representing them at the "CAD Framework Initiative" efforts or CFI. The express goal of this was to create a set of interchange formats for CAD tools so that you could move things from one system to another, you could store and diff changes, and even if your vendor we…

Its a pretty big rift from my perspective. We were right alongside mechanical and architectural majore at VTC, they all learned some really crufty cad programs. The worst was SolidWworks, scripting that thing is a pig if damn near impossible. As a wanna-be tech startup in the field, I'd stay away from those tools like a plague. I heard there was way to do it, but its the kind of thing hiding behind their coprorate pay-wall and for profit training material.

I've been impressed with tools like freecad - Its all implemented on top of a great Python API and lets you run code against some of their core modules. Developing procedural and programatically (parametrically?) designed hardware is much easier - and you can still interface with the average CAD worker / engineer.

That being said, the average designer is SOL in this workchain.

Still haven't found a good mix.

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#59

Post by ultimape »

Animats wrote: post #53

Most of the people commenting here haven't used those tools. In a modern CAD system, like SolidWorks and Autodesk Inventor, the systems retain much more than geometry. There's lots of structure. "This is a round hole" (STL doesn't even have that.) "This part is a 6/32 screw, pan head, 3/4 inch length". "This edge of this part aligns with this other edge of this other part" "This part is made of mild steel". "This sub…

I'm curious if you could recommend a way to do parametric design with SolidWorks.

The way my friend was doing it, the system ended up chugging like a pig and he had a rather impressive machine.

I'd prefer a system involved with a programming language. I get the impression that SW isn't geared to do that because the market they serve doesn't care for that level of control.

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#60

Post by hueving »

ef4 wrote: post #39
chx wrote: post #10

> They are also not on github, which makes collaboration that much harder. This is now vim-emacs level zealotry. There are workflows which gasp do not mesh well with github. github issues/PRs have almost no metadata and absolutely none that the issue submitter can set.

> There are workflows which gasp do not mesh well with github. If we're discussing open source collaboration, it is hugely beneficial to NOT have your own unique workflow and instead adopt one that a large community of people are already using. In the time it takes to read your special "how to submit a patch" document, I could have already been done if you were using a de-facto standard workflow like Github's. This h…

>I have heard it argued that making contributions harder to submit is somehow a good idea, because it keeps lower quality contributors out. This is very much mistaken, and even someone as cantankerous as Linus is on the record saying that encouraging more patches, even annoyingly naive ones, is in the long-term interest of the project.

Yet Linux is not being developed on Github. Clearly the missing data in the github workflow is so detrimental that it's not worth the extra developers it might attract.

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