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New Part Spacing Featurescript
christopher_dziuba
Member Posts: 92 ✭✭
Hey all,
I've made a custom FS that separates parts an exact distance from each-other relative to a selected plane.
took me a while so happy to share my little passion project milestone. This is particularly useful for separating parts ready to be nested / nesting:
The parts space in the order they are selected, in other words for every part you select all previously selected parts move together:
Note that in the second image part 6 and 5 (Long part and left large part) are selected first and so move left together once the right part is selected.
The script is indeed very process heavy (laggy) as there is no way to perform the necessary processing without also creating and deleting entities as reference using featurescript. However it is quiet powerful:
I like this example as it would be very time consuming for me to space these parts using sketches as references but using this script it takes just a few seconds. Parts don't have to be flat either all that matters is you select the plane you want things to be spaced on:
Merry Christmas everyone. Let me know if this helps anyone, if there's any bugs or if you want an explanation on how it works as it's a little complex.
Here's the Featurescript Link !!!
You can ignore all the other tabs in my doc. I'm working on a pretty big project.
Comments
@christopher_dziuba sorry I couldn't help myself from staring at the other tabs in that doc. I've been getting some serious mileage out of a modified version of Make Skins for the last several months and I'm extremely curious about your AlphaCAM export tab. I'm in the market for some other CAM software options that can offer more automation than I'm working with now and AlphaCAM is one of the names on the list of candidates.
@derek_van_allen By complete coincidence I saw your comment not long after you posted. If you want to chat more email me @ dziuba.christopher@gmail.com. I'm usually not on here on this account. It makes me ecstatic to know someone out there is making good use of my little tool.
I use "AlphaCAM export" in conjunction with Assign Material, assign Edging and AlphaCAM export table for work and it makes it possible to use AlphaCAM with Onshape to make workorders with:
-Machine Style assignment (specific to Alphacam)
-Material assignment
-Grain direction
-Edge Banding
-Automatic premill offset for non-premillable edges
-and more to come
I also use the edging takeoff table to quickly get an edging takeoff. Also note that I have searched far and wide for good CAMS to use with Onshape and nothing comes close to the speed and Optimisation magic of Alphacam. It's the only program I've seen that can nest better and faster then what I can do manually. But you must use there "Production Pack + Automation Manager" to get the most of it.
However I've decided to start working on an actual app for the appstore which is a mammoth project for me. Reason is even though my code works it's a bit tedious to use. If you want I'd be happy to show you how it works but you're not the 1st to ask so I feel like just making a YouTube video might be better.
@christopher_dziuba I'll follow up via email for sure but while I'm here in the forum on my professional account I'll leave a few more breadcrumbs for the next woodworking CAM person to follow. I just had an Alphacam territory manager reach out the other day and ask me which modules I needed and here's what they said they had:
Of which I said I'm for sure going to need xAutomation, xSolids, xNesting and probably xAPI. I haven't yet seen their demo for working with my parts (scheduled for next week) but I'll be comparing to how CAMWorks / NestingWorks has been for us where it's able to nest and program sheets that look like these in under 15 minutes:
I did tell them that I'm heavily interested in their xAPI module in particular because the amount of manual data organization that goes into managing a monthly workload of a thousand sheets that look just like this full of brand new unique parts is ripe for automation the whole way through the stack. A large part of our drafters' responsibilities at the moment are simply copy and pasting information into different locations, would love to hear more about your app because I'm sure there's some significant overlap with what I'm about to do.
@derek_van_allen I was holding my breath for an email hahaha. Should have just logged back in here earlier. I had no idea Alphacam had an API module!! This is Hyper exciting to me. I'm done getting deeply familiar with JavaScript and am about half way through getting comfortable with Git. I'm not a fast learner but I don't consider something learnt until I have intimate knowledge of it.
Sounds like you must have some developers / employees who can do web dev. As you can see I'm already confident in featurescript and have over a decade of setout and floor experience in the joinery commercial sector (The complex joinery). Maybe we can help each-other out? My biggest limitation at the moment is doing this alone while still needing to make an income.
@christopher_dziuba sorry to leave you hanging, I was actually on vacation all of last week so I only got to see AlphaCAM's demo today after I got back. It looks like it handles most of what I need but I'm waiting to hear back about what kinds of things their API enables. Kinda hoping it lets me set up a full lights out scheduler for the mill department but I won't know until they send me something.
As far as the development team goes at my company well, yes and no. Our staff is unusually tech savvy and computer literate for an industry which is essentially still fancy cabinet building, but I'm our only dedicated developer. We have some guys who are great at setting up front-end stuff for our website but when it comes to systems integration or automation those projects usually end up in my lap.