Using a data file to pick and place components?

david_duncan238

I am a retired engineer / amateur artist and I have a project that I wondered if I could use onshape for.  Basically I want to make a grid (about 30 x 23) of 6 different types of cubes, these would be selected depending upon the data in a file which would be read in sequence.  The file (yet to be made) would be derived from a small pixelated black and white photo. I have not found anyone else who has done this, and I was wondering if it was at all possible. I fear it is not and that I will have to write some software to do this for me. Hopefully someone has some great ideas. 

Just to clarify, the goal of the project is to take a simple image and convert the pixels to one of six (may change) different cubes.  The cubes will have different slopes on their fronts, catching the light to represent different levels of grey.  For small pictures I will be able to do this by hand, but I would like to automate the process so that I can go bigger and 3D print.  Hope that makes sense

david_duncan238

I have just discovered Feature Scripts, I shall look into this.

SethF

I did something very similar. I used third parties to extract/format pixel data. But then this does about the same thing you’re talking about. You’d just want yours to assign a slope angle instead of a color to the different pixels.
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/18579/just-for-fun-pixel-cuboids#latest

It was only ever half-baked, and only ever just-for-the-fun-of-it. But hopefully it'd be a decent starting point.

david_duncan238

SethF said:

I did something very similar. I used third parties to extract/format pixel data. But then this does about the same thing you’re talking about. You’d just want yours to assign a slope angle instead of a color to the different pixels.
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/18579/just-for-fun-pixel-cuboids#latest

It was only ever half-baked, and only ever just-for-the-fun-of-it. But hopefully it'd be a decent starting point.

Thanks SethF, that looks promising, I shall look into your code. 

EvanReese

@TimRice
made this Polaroid custom feature which might be worth a look too. https://cad.onshape.com/documents/de0dbdee5fd3fd6810179f54/v/279829d6a0503ecd86a33c2d/e/fb5f3d22261e41f0dcca0ecb

david_duncan238

Thanks @SethF and @Evan_Reese for your input.  I have modified SethF's code and made a bunch of tiles in a greyscale (Greyscale) and I have made a squat cube with a triangle on top (SlopedCube), but I am having problems...

Firstly I this part of the code in SlopedTriangle...

        // Draw triangle on side of squat cube

        skPolyline(sideTriangle, "polyline1", {

                "points" : [

                    vector( 0,  0) * millimeter,

                    vector( -10,  0) * millimeter,

                    vector( -10,  5) * millimeter,

                    vector( 0,  0) * millimeter

                ]

        });

I am not able to change the "5" for the variable tHeight.

And secondly I am having problems integrating the triangles into the Greyscale code.

Here is a link to my code...

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/fb0ed495e5d632ce2327435c/w/9e9dc44a0a8ae3e252105af2/e/7b1ac23f74f7656795ca7dbc

I have commented out the bits that don't work in "Greyscale".

I found that I could make the wedge shapes I wanted manually using rotate in MoveFace, but I could not make the Rotate feature work in Feature Script.

I'm not that familiar with Feature Script, but I have done a fair amount of C and HTML. I'm sure there is probably a better way of approaching this, I would appreciate a little help.

David