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Sprint 2 Project Ideas
marena_richardson
Member Posts: 20 EDU
Tessellation
Automatic tessellator of a shape such as turning a hexagon into a honeycomb
Cannot be easily done with a linear or circular pattern in the existing GUI, but seems very doable with FeatureScript
Example: Honeycomb tessellations to preserve material of a 3D printed side
Ropes/Knots
Attempt to make a knot in the middle of a cylinder for example (3D splines?)
Make a rope texture automagically using revolve and math
Query Notebook
Description: Provide a variety of interactive samples for learning how to query for edges, parts, vertices, planes, etc. Ideally, these query/code samples would be accompanied by some visual indicators/graphics.
Practical applications: This would help with understanding what queries are, how to use them, several different strategies to query for the same thing, debugging, and so forth, and greatly ease the learning curve for both coders and mechanical engineers trying to adopt FeatureScript. This would also help people incorporate more user-friendly inputs to their feature dialogs/precondition variables.
Depointify - search for points and fillet (could be auto-fillet)
Find points and smooth them
Kind of like a low pass filter
Example: You have scanned some object and have the CAD file for it, but it has many unfortunate irregularities. You want a ”smoothing” function that can take this surface and smooth it.
Auto-pattern
Fill a sheet of stock with X copies of Part A and Y copies of Part B
Useful for waterjet/laser cutting
Filling tool / molds
Tool that would make the negative of the shape such as the inside of a hollow water bottle or the cast for a part.
Check if Closed: 2D and 3D
2D - determine if a sketched is closed, and if it has hanging sketches.
3D - determine if a part is geometrically closed. Example: could any water get into this part?
Comments
For the sake of providing Onshape/FS flavor, I'm responding to each feature. I assume you'll want to pick some small subset of these to work on, especially if you're doing it in teams.
Tessellation
Linear pattern actually takes two directions (which need not be perpendicular), so strictly speaking that handles the square/hexagon cases.
That said, I could see this being useful as a "texturizer": select a sketch region, select a texture from a list, and FS will add that texture, repeated over the sketch region.
Could be extended 3D: perhaps the same interface as "shell", but instead of making the removed part empty, fill it with some texture.
Ropes/Knots
I like it. Lots to play with here: The rope texture and the knot problem might be two separate projects?
Random thought: Making a grip (as in, something I can hold comfortably with fingers) is a similar problem to making a rope texture, but it could be more relevant to CAD, outside of rendering. It's a good FS candidate because it's rather tough to get it right, but only really needs to be solved once.
Query Notebook
I agree that this would be useful. That said, the hard part is deciding what queries/patterns are actually used. This feels like it would be addressed by the others to some extent.
Depointify - search for points and fillet (could be auto-fillet)
My instinct says there are better tools than Onshape for this kind of stuff. Having a boundary representation (faces, edges, etc) honestly just makes things more difficult when you don't get to choose where those faces lie. Someone who wants this kind of behavior might be using a tool with more surfacing capabilities, or just use a sculpting tool (maya/zbrush).
Maybe having a "fillet all convex edges" (child-safety) or a "fillet all concave edges" (3D-printability)? Maybe a more general tool with length/angle thresholds. I'd have to check if we have queries to support that, but if we don't, we probably should.
Auto-pattern
I really like this. An Onshape-oriented workflow might look like: Model assembled, laser-cuttable parts in Part Studio 1. Derive them into Part Studio 2. Apply your feature to transform them onto a flat surface.
Figure out which side of each part is the laser-cuttable side. Error if the thickness is wrong.
Place them on a plane (opTransform), spacing them based on their bounding box. Binary tree bin packing? Something more naive?
Optionally, store your previous tree/set of bounding boxes on the context so you can use multiple features if necessary to continue populating the sheet.
Optionally, improve spacing by squeezing the parts together based on min boundary distance along an axis (not sure if FS can currently evaluate this, but it'd be possible to expose). The general case of the packing problem is definitely intractable but a half-decent job seems possible.
Filling tool / molds
I don't know much about making injection molds. Is there more to do than subtracting the part from some box? If so, and it's programmable, then this is a good FS candidate.
Check if Closed: 2D and 3D
Both 2D and 3D versions seem very doable.