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Showing posts from December, 2022

Editable ISO Mesh for Curves Workbench Part 1

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I talked about creating a Rhino3D tween curve on my Patreon page a few weeks ago ( https://www.patreon.com/posts/75954207 ) and an idea that I have to get this working as a macro in #FreeCAD. But I thought I try to make a few intermediary macros to get myself back into the swings of programming again.  I already created the 'curve to freehand b-spline' in a previous post but now I want to take this a step further and create a 'ISO curve to freehand b-spline mesh'.  This means that there would be a fully eatable mesh that can be lofted, approximated with some kind of NURBS surface such as a Gordan surfaced or even a plane loft or ruled surface.  Building it with Freehand B-Splines will allow a user to double clicking the individual curves to edit the mesh via the control points.  The ISO surface interrogates a selected surface and creates a UV grid which follows the contours.  My idea is to take this ISO grid and make it fully editable as a mesh allow the resulting surfa

FreeCAD Error Index With Resolutions

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The starts of a List of #FreeCAD Errors With Resolution / Fix / Work around To date there is no known list of error messages with resolutions in existence.  The process of creating such a list is not straight forward.  You may think that all that is needed is for a programmer to go through the code and list them along with the resolution, but it is not that straight forwards. FreeCAD is written in C++ and modules can be written in both C++ and Python. If your developer or have an understanding of the coding languages used then you could search the projects github repository.  Looking through the code for the commands that output the standard information, error and warning message to the screen will allow a list to be compiled detailing these errors.  I have included the links below to allow you to take a look at where in the source code that these messages are echoed to the screen : https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/search?q=printerror https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/search?q=pr

Will this make FreeCAD Run Faster on Linux?

Buried deep in a forum post, missed by many eyes was a little snippet of terminal code that will change the processor priority to allow FreeCAD to be assigned the maximum cpu power. After about an hour of digging I finally found the snippet I sent to myself (unfortunately not the link to the post). sudo nice -n -20 sudo -u yourusername ~/your/location/of/freecad.AppImage This 'nice' command sets the priority of freeCAD to -20, there are 140 priorities in total split into two priority ranges. The first of the two is the 'niceness' where default niceness priority is 0 and ranges from the highest (-20) to the lowest (19). This is the one we are interested in and can be customised to our needs. The second ranges from 1 - 99 (default) and 100 - 139 (user space) as is the real time priority. We can see the niceness of the current running process by using the command: top or htop. The NI column shows the current niceness. I have yet to try this command on freeCAD but there is

Curve Workbench Macro: Curve to Freehand B-Spline

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This Macro takes a selected curve and creates a freehand b-spline which follows its edge.  The macro is the start of creating a freeCAD version of the tween curve in Rhino3D for the Curves workbench.  The first hurdle is to convert a selected curve to a freehand b-spline.  I have decided that I just need to use the curve as an initial guide, so I don't want to connect the new bspline to it, but just follow the curvature.  The next steps would be to apply this to a ISO curve surface, creating multiple freehand b-spline for each edge. Unlisted Video: https://youtu.be/fycOs-0Oy8M The way I have tackled this is to take the selected curve and discretize the edge.  If you search for the meaning of this word then you will find numerous explanations, most of which are complicated and far too in depth to understand for the non-mathematical minded (or the average mathematical minded!).  I have found this a lot during my research, when authors explaining mathematical terms, it seems that the

Teaming Up With a FreeCAD Dev!

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If you follow my FreeCAD YouTube channel you'll have seen the quantity of videos that I have produced.  At time of speaking over 340 videos are available to watch at: https://www.youtube.com/@MangoJellySolutions   These are being added to weekly and currently I have been non stop averaging 2 videos a week.  This includes also making content for Patreon, replying to comments and questions (my inbox is constantly full so please bear with me) and managing the many aspects of being a teacher and content creator (including starting this blog). Most of my video's are 'adhoc' but I do have some long running series / themes such as: Learning FreeCAD for Beginners Understanding FreeCAD Curves Workbench Series Lattice2 Series Lately I have started working with a developer who has extensive knowledge of the FreeCAD code base, the hope this is going to unlock the secrets of FreeCAD and bring more value to the channel.  In exchange I am helping him understand YouTube as a creator, s

Settings and Resources to Help With Human / Disability Visual Issues

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Being visually impaired myself (due to injury I became partially blind and now have an artificial lens in one of my eyes to 'fix' my sight) and the channel attracting a good spread across ages with varying eye sight and visual abilities I have decided to start to build a information resource to help in this area. Anyone with any information they think that would be helpful and should be included please contact me and I will add. This includes both tools and style sheets that can help with visual aids. What styles work for you? Do you like the dark styles or do you prefer the default light style that comes with freeCAD as default. Please note that his page is still a 'work in progress' and it's worth checking back for updates. I am especially interested in any setting for higher definition monitors that need special configuration if any. At the moment there is a project carved out in the freeCAD development road map to fix issues with larger and high resolution