Laserjoint and surface DXF export issue on radius

henry_feldman

I mostly use OnShape for either 3D printing or laser cutting, so depend on the LaserJoint feature script add in. So ran into a pair of issues. One question there a way to export the outer "surface" of the gray part as DXF? (this is a "living hinge" part so I just want the whole surface as a rectangle with the holes cut in the appropriate places.


Second problem is when I apply the laser joint featurescript between the pink part and gray I get this, which is clearly not what I was looking for (I'd accept just the finger joints but cutting the whole part into slices is weird):

grochino

I believe Laser Joint was created by @lemon1324

henry_feldman

gaby_rochino said:

I believe Laser Joint was created by @lemon1324

Ah thanks, the front page has all sorts of info except that...

lemon1324

@henry_feldman

I had to make a couple decisions when writing the code to make it feasible and not get caught in an enormous number of very specific corner cases.

The core assumption of the feature is that all parts you feed in are planar, and all resulting intersections between those parts have a linear direction given by the cross product of the normals of the largest planar face on each part.

Best practice for your case is to manually make a tab and then circular pattern/mirror, unless there's an algorithm I couldn't think of that would allow automatic resolution of how to make tabs along that circular intersection.

Also, pushed a new version with my forum handle in the documentation, so people don't have to search "laser joint" in the forums to find me.

As far as unwrapping, I believe @konstantin_shiriazdanov only wrote a wrapper FS, not an unwrapper.  For circular arcs, I think current OS Sheet metal will unwrap it into a flat pattern, or there's an app in the store called ExactFlat that will do that (which is both not free and which I haven't tried)

konstantin_shiriazdanov

Sketch wrapper can unwrap cylinder or cone faces, Fold FS can upwrap faces of surfaces with constant cross section, but as I can see here unwrapped face would be of rectangular shape, so you can use Measure distance FS

MBartlett21

@henry_feldman
To unfold it, make a sheet metal model and select thicken at the top, then select the faces you want to thicken