IRC log for #brlcad on 20090111

00:08.05 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: 03brlcad * r33524 10/brlcad/trunk/TODO: getting incrTcl subconfigure to work would be kind of a waste of time given how much it's radically changed for the pending 4.0 release that has a drastically changed build system.
01:45.50 *** join/#brlcad Ralith (n=ralith@216.162.199.202)
02:32.12 yukonbob hey cadheads
02:35.55 *** join/#brlcad BigAToo (n=BigAToo@pool-96-230-124-205.sbndin.btas.verizon.net)
02:38.20 bjork_ such a word exists?
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02:54.13 brlcad apparently ;)
03:48.44 brlcad struggles to find a way to make incrTcl work with system tcl/tk
04:10.54 Ralith suggests bribery
04:15.15 brlcad has a plot developing
04:36.48 Twingy PEANUT BUTTAH JELLY TIME!@!
05:00.55 brlcad peanut buttah jelly with a baseball bat!
05:02.20 poolio Heh, I have a friend who dressed up in a banana suit and went around singing that for halloween :)
05:02.44 brlcad hehe
05:15.30 Twingy polishes up gcam for release tomorrow
05:18.28 DanielFalck hey Twingy, what's new in gcam?
05:18.53 Twingy DanielFalck: hi
05:19.37 DanielFalck Twingy: does it run under Mac OS X?
05:20.24 Twingy no more cut/paste/move prev move next, replaced with drag and drop in treeview, object picking in 3D window, material origin selection, improved pocketing code, several bug fixes, flip direction, and adding helical tool paths in sketches atm
05:20.39 Twingy DanielFalck: yea, if you have gtk + gtkglext + opengl
05:20.59 DanielFalck ok, I might be able to get them installed here
05:21.18 Twingy after I get ubuntu .deb package done I need to talk to emc guys to get it onto live CD
05:21.24 Twingy after that I need to update the manual
05:22.20 DanielFalck I have gtkglext1 in fink, cool
05:22.39 Twingy after that I am extending the Y axis on my mill an extra 4 inches, machining out a new bedway and rails
05:23.00 Twingy I need to be able to cut 9" diameter for a vacuum chamber I'm working on
05:23.27 DanielFalck 9" diameter what?
05:23.34 Twingy circle
05:24.44 DanielFalck in aluminum?
05:25.04 Twingy acrylic, the bed way is T-6061 aluminum, the rails are T-306 stainless
05:25.45 Twingy then I am junking the 1/4 HP AC motor for a 3-phase brushless
05:25.54 Twingy much smaller and more efficient
05:26.05 Twingy and I can wire speed controller into the xylotex for digital control
05:27.43 Twingy I've had about 20 orders come to the house in the last month
05:29.33 DanielFalck you make vacuum chambers commercially?
05:30.40 Twingy no no, this is for a flywheel project I'm doing
05:30.48 DanielFalck oh, ok...
05:32.50 Twingy hopefully another 9 months doesn't go by before the next release
05:33.49 DanielFalck do you have dxf import in gcam?
05:34.31 Twingy that's next ver
05:34.45 Twingy I've got all the contouring algorithms done when I did the RS274X code
05:34.53 Twingy so it should be fairly painless
05:35.23 Twingy I just don't want to get bogged down in writing too much software in one stint
05:35.39 DanielFalck do you do offset contour pocketing?
05:35.39 Twingy gcam is second to my projects
05:35.58 Twingy the contour pocketing is in the same boat, the algorithms are there I just haven't tied them into the sketches yet
05:36.33 Twingy there's a ton of low hanging fruit in gcam right now, just limited amount of time to do stuff
05:36.37 DanielFalck I've been told that the algorithms for pocketing are pretty hard
05:36.57 DanielFalck I might be wrong...
05:38.47 Twingy well zig zag is trivial, it's just horizontal lines with a finish pass
05:39.06 Twingy there are papers on the contouring, but honestly it's not as complicated as people make it out to be
05:39.08 DanielFalck how about offset contour with islans?
05:39.16 DanielFalck islands-
05:39.28 Twingy exactly, so I have an algorithm that does line/line line/arc arc/arc intersections
05:39.29 DanielFalck that's the one everyone seems to avoid
05:39.44 Twingy and I can set a negative offset and perform the intersections
05:40.02 Twingy once the offset gets to a point where 0 area exists then it's done
05:40.37 Twingy so it's basically just a for loop calling this function over and over decreasing the offset by the radius of the end mill
05:40.58 Twingy and the islands just form as a result of the intersections
05:41.30 Twingy all that intersection code was kind of a headache to write, but it has so much application
05:41.47 DanielFalck I hope you get that one going. Nobody else seems to be working on it in the OS world
05:42.19 Twingy I put in a formal application to GNU community for GNU approval
05:42.32 Twingy I think it has enough critical mass to be looked at seriously
05:43.06 Twingy and I think once the contour pocketing and STL/DXF is done it's going to put a number of those less $100 software packages out of business
05:43.09 DanielFalck what does the GNU approval do for the project?
05:43.22 Twingy it means that if you log into the gnu ftp site you'll see gcam there
05:43.27 DanielFalck ok
05:43.34 DanielFalck just like gcc
05:43.37 Twingy right
05:43.43 Twingy it'll probably be real close to gcc :)
05:44.20 Twingy they advocate using guile for the development environment but we'll see about that :)
05:44.22 DanielFalck yes
05:45.01 Twingy I just keep chipping away at it
05:45.24 Twingy I worked on large software project before this called Nurbana, but I am now convinced I lost interest because I didn't use it in my projects
05:45.34 Twingy I am using GCAM on a weekly, some times daily basis
05:45.40 Twingy it's the perfect synergy
05:48.27 DanielFalck fink didn't have gtk+2.10 , so I'm downloading something from the Gtk+ site for os X now
05:48.30 DanielFalck 2.14
05:50.07 Twingy ah
05:50.16 Twingy what did it have?
05:50.22 DanielFalck 2.6.10
05:50.31 Twingy oh wow, that is ancient
05:50.37 Twingy that is like 5 years old
05:50.45 DanielFalck yeah, fink is really old in the tooth
05:51.06 Twingy that came out long before dapper drake
05:51.14 DanielFalck it's been several years since I've used a mac at home and Linux is much nicer for source code
05:51.27 Twingy I jut got a black berry with blue tooth modem tethering
05:51.28 DanielFalck I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 on this box
05:51.32 Twingy I set it up on my mac in like 30 seconds
05:51.44 Twingy I can surf the net at about 1Mb now anywhere
05:52.08 Twingy works from ubuntu as well
05:52.14 Twingy I love it
05:52.52 Twingy I got a little USB thing http://www.cirago.com/images/bluetooth/Cirago_BTA3210_2.jpg
05:53.00 Twingy I can plug it into desktop computers and they can surf the net too
05:53.54 Ralith Twingy: oo, you're the gcam guy?
05:54.02 Twingy Ralith: yes!
05:54.17 Ralith how hard do you think it would be to add fused deposition modelling support?
05:54.34 Twingy you just need a command to turn the head on and off right?
05:54.50 Twingy and it's an additive process instead of subtractive
05:54.51 Ralith as far as tool control? yeah
05:55.03 Twingy right?
05:55.06 Ralith yes
05:55.10 Twingy should be trivial
05:55.12 Ralith that's the bit I'd expect to cause probl--
05:55.14 Ralith awesome!
05:55.33 Twingy in terms of rendering the final object I just invert the bit on the voxels
05:55.38 Twingy so they appear instead of dissapear
05:55.52 Ralith what sort of files can gcam take?
05:56.06 Twingy Ralith: only gerber files for circuit boards, next version will have DXF/STL stuff
05:56.15 Twingy version after that I plan on support 4D and 5D mills
05:56.31 Ralith er, you have (and have had for a long time) screenshots w/ 3D stuff
05:56.53 Twingy there will be a few minor releases in bewtween the next two major releases
05:57.07 Twingy to improve performance and 3D rendering I think
05:57.15 Ralith so 3D is not actually currently supported?
05:57.19 Twingy it is
05:57.27 Ralith how, if all you can take is gerber?
05:57.27 Twingy wire frame and voxel view
05:57.42 Twingy the rendering is done based on the tool paths and a hunk of material in gcam
05:57.50 Twingy it mills away material
05:57.55 Twingy you click render and you see the final part
05:58.00 Ralith er, doesn't gcam generate the toolpaths?
05:58.02 Twingy yes
05:58.10 Twingy but you can preview what your part will look like
05:58.14 Ralith what does it generate the toolpaths from?
05:58.24 Twingy it's coarse, but it's a good way of checking before you cut it out
05:58.33 Twingy the tool paths come from my libgcode
05:58.39 Twingy it's thousands of lines of code
05:58.45 Ralith where does it get the information with which to generate the toolpaths
05:58.49 Ralith it's not telepathic
05:59.07 Twingy the GUI, you create sketches, bolt holes, drill holes, etc
05:59.17 Twingy you see it in wire frame
05:59.26 Ralith so it can't import models at all?
05:59.35 Twingy only gerber right now
05:59.41 Ralith gerber doesn't do models
05:59.41 Twingy next version will be dxf/stl
05:59.42 Ralith it does PCBs
05:59.45 Twingy correct
05:59.51 Ralith so it can't import models.
05:59.57 Ralith damn.
06:00.16 Twingy it's already in bugzilla as a feature request
06:00.27 Ralith no plans for including BRL-CAD databases in the list of supported formats in the near future?
06:00.42 Twingy supporting brl-cad would be quirky
06:00.54 Twingy you would be better off exporting dxf/stl from brl-cad
06:01.13 Twingy assuming brl-cad dxf/stl is working now
06:02.39 Twingy just to give you an arbitrary date, let's say beginning of summer for dxf/stl support
06:05.33 Ralith exporting STL is lossy
06:05.45 Ralith you can't represent anything smooth
06:08.09 Twingy right, but keep in mind gcode natively only supports lines and arcs
06:08.57 Twingy some of the objects in brl-cad could be turned into piece wise arcs, but for the most part it will have to be tesselated anyway to get into arcs or lines
06:09.04 Ralith stl doesn't support arcs.
06:09.14 Twingy exactly
06:09.20 Twingy so if brl-cad has a nurbs surface
06:09.33 Ralith it can be much more closely approximated with arcs than with lines.
06:09.46 Twingy the spline will have to undergo decomposition into bezier curves, then into bernstein polynomials, then into arcs
06:09.52 Ralith or, at worst, approximated with similar accuracy with much less data.
06:10.36 Twingy it would be a great deal of code to recognize the 20 or 30 primitives in brl-cad and figure out how to decompose those into arcs properly
06:10.56 Twingy especially with boolean operations
06:11.19 Twingy brl-cad ray traces the CSG to get the final result
06:11.29 Ralith and you could take advantage of that raytracing.
06:11.38 Twingy and ray tracing is tesselating
06:11.40 Ralith you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
06:11.53 Twingy how is ray tracing different from tesselating?
06:12.06 Ralith uh, it's a different thing
06:12.13 Twingy think about it...
06:12.14 Ralith how is solving a formula different from taking a square root?
06:12.26 Twingy so with ray tracing you have a grid of rays
06:12.35 Twingy and the result is a collection of intersection points
06:12.44 Twingy the intersection points form a point cloud or mesh
06:12.48 Ralith there's significantly more to it than that :P
06:12.54 Ralith not only that, who said anything about a grid?
06:12.54 Twingy the mesh is a tesselated representation of the implicit geometry
06:13.14 Ralith BRL-CAD gives you a lot more than a point when you get a rayhit.
06:13.19 Twingy Ralith: because you are not beam tracing, a ray is infinitely thin
06:13.32 Ralith more than enough to accurately place circular arcs, in fact.
06:14.01 Twingy I disagree, because you can end up resulting in moire and aliasing artificacts
06:14.31 Twingy you have to choose the density of your grid of rays
06:14.40 Twingy if it is not high enough you lose detail
06:15.36 Twingy now, you could "interpolate" the results returned from the ray intersections, but you are still not exactly representing the implicit geometry
06:15.46 Twingy because ray tracing is a form tessellating
06:16.32 Twingy as the grid density approaches infinity the point cloud approaches and implicit representation
06:18.24 Twingy I think you can clearly see this as an Inductive Proof
06:19.29 Twingy DanielFalck: did gtk compile?
06:32.29 DanielFalck I got it to build, but I misconfigured it - I have gtk libs for the old fink build along with the new one
06:32.48 DanielFalck I'm not even sure how to clean it up and get things linked right
06:33.15 DanielFalck I just went through this with the latest version of tcl/tk and got things sorted out
06:33.23 DanielFalck but it takes me a while
06:34.10 DanielFalck Twingy: visit #cam if you feel like it. there are some of us working on/playing with other os cam systems
06:34.22 Twingy k
06:34.42 DanielFalck Dan Heeks has some interesting stuff as does crotchet
07:02.46 Twingy looks like he is making progress
07:02.54 Twingy how long has he been at it?
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07:14.28 DanielFalck I'm not sure
07:14.45 DanielFalck he programs cam for a living
07:23.35 Twingy so if I put him out of business that would be bad for him
07:24.13 Twingy isn't he kind of hurting himself by giving stuff away for free if he is trying to make money off of it to survive?
07:24.38 DanielFalck I'm not sure of the motivation. You'll have to ask hime
07:24.40 DanielFalck him
07:30.18 DanielFalck I'm just glad he's willing to share
07:31.53 Twingy you can't beat free :)
07:32.27 DanielFalck the other guy I mentioned, crotchet, is a machinist who has learned to program c++
07:33.16 DanielFalck he's ported over the old apt360 fortran code (in C, not C++) and has a nice app called aptsketch, that I actually use for making gcode
07:33.42 DanielFalck it uses gtkmm and opengl
07:34.21 DanielFalck I'm just a rookie,learning python
07:44.24 Twingy k, I'm off to bed
07:44.55 DanielFalck it was good chatting with you
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17:21.03 starseeker DanielFalck: Is there a link for aptsketch anywhere?
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18:02.40 DanielFalck http://sourceforge.net/projects/aptos/
18:04.04 DanielFalck another interesting project:
18:04.05 DanielFalck http://heekscnc.blogspot.com/
18:19.28 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: 03brlcad * r33525 10/brlcad/trunk/src/other/incrTcl/compat/ (43 files in 2 dirs):
18:19.28 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: add the tcl/tk headers for 8.4 since if we're compiling against a system 8.4, we
18:19.28 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: still need access to tclInt.h and friends (which are not publicly installed
18:19.28 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: headers). put them in a version-specific 'compat' directory that we can later
18:19.28 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: refer to via cppflags.
18:19.52 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: 03brlcad * r33526 10/brlcad/trunk/src/other/incrTcl/Makefile.am: include compat in the dist
18:27.02 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: 03brlcad * r33527 10/brlcad/trunk/ (3 files in 3 dirs):
18:27.02 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: if we're compiling against a system 8.4, use the newly added 'compat' headers in
18:27.02 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: src/other/incrTcl/compat/8.4 so that we get the proper internal/private tcl/tk
18:27.02 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: headers. this makes the entire compilation succeed using system tcl/tk with our
18:27.04 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: bundled incrTcl, toggled off of the TCL_8_4_HEADERS conditional. also makes it
18:27.06 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: so we can remove that tcl+itcl sanity check section that forced our tcl/tk if
18:27.08 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: not 8.5.
18:39.34 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: 03brlcad * r33528 10/brlcad/trunk/configure.ac: remove some dead logic, update the comment about -fast (it's because of aliasing), and remove the silly HAVE_BRLCAD conditional.
18:53.19 CIA-65 BRL-CAD: 03brlcad * r33529 10/brlcad/trunk/TODO: too vague a task and it's an on-going one
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20:49.05 mafm hi
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22:53.18 brlcad howdy mafm
22:53.24 brlcad (woo hoo, tv is now up on the wall)
22:56.17 mafm burn it down! it only tells you lies :P
22:58.57 Ralith hehe
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23:18.38 IriX64 http://www3.sympatico.ca/mario.dulisse2/project-cassandra.png <--- cassandra coming along :)
23:28.38 brlcad mafm: hehe, so true
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