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 CAD / Development / Organizations / LDraw / 3509
3508  |  3510
Subject: 
Re: LSC - request for defining a WORKING connection database standard
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.dev.lcd, lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw
Date: 
Mon, 18 Jul 2005 15:08:11 GMT
Viewed: 
115 times
  
In lugnet.cad, danny staple <orionrobots@gmail.com> wrote:

On 7/17/05, Larry Pieniazek at@at dot.dot
<larmiltontrainworkscom@qs483.pair.com> wrote:
I'm not sure where this standard definition is at these days, or whether it
could be used to automate what I'm doing by a clever MetaWiki robot coder, but
I
(and others) started capturing some connection information in BrickWiki (
http://brickwiki.zapto.org/ )

You can see what we've created so far here:

http://brickwiki.zapto.org/index.php/Category:Connnection_Types and the
articles
in that category...

Do people think this is valuable? Would people like to take a crack at adding
more types? Or rendering the needed images for the types there already? or
refining the ConnectionTypeBox?

Note that Rosco already did take a crack at a few, including generating some
images for them, and in doing so, found a problem in one I created, and caused
me to decide to add fields to the connectionTypeBox, which is goodness. Thanks!

Wikis are editable by anyone... if enough people capture what they know on
BrickWiki, this one will be really cool.

I saw a couple other people  adding comments (corrections, expansions, links to
good external articles, etc) to the talk pages associated with the entries,
While that's awesome in its own right, I'd like to encourage people to be
bold...  Edit that info right into the main article if you're sure it adds
value. (after peeking at the article to grok how the tagging and layout works)
Wikis can be edited by anyone. (Just please consider setting up an ID first so
we can tell who did it and so that communication back to you can happen)

While a connection database could be helpful, I just cant help
thinking that a relationship/constrain system like solidworks and
Pro/Engineer use could acheive a lot more.

It could certainly be a start, then simplified - so the CAD
applications (MLCad etc), then try (with confirmation) to make
assumptions that you want to place a peice on that one - with the
studs attached as so. It would be nice to tell it to center an axle in
a hole and so on.

This could get interesting though - as there are no real curves and no
parametric definitions, and therefore no center points defined - so
creating a "concentric" or "tangent" constraint could be difficult.
This may be contraversial (very) but an extension to the LDraw
standard could allow more advanced clients to work with parametric
definitions, and then render them into simple meshes for use in
others.

Just my two pence worth, I used to be a software engineer with a large
CAD corp - so I have a lot of ideas on this stuff.

I agree with all that and certainly would love to see it come to pass.

However, my thinking on the stuff being put in BrickWiki though, is more
"encyclopedic", that is, it's an explanation of what's possible rather than a
constraint system. New builders often ask "how did you do that, how did you get
those things to connect that way" and perhaps these entries would be a resource
on how to do things. More techniques in the toolbox means better builders,
faster. And that means builders who enjoy themselves more, I think.

If LSC actually does get a lot of data, I'd be after getting someone to try to
write a bot to inhale it and create the connection box info.

(there could be a parallel of sorts in setting up information on how to do SNOT,
what sorts of things turn what angles, and information on how to do offsets,
what sorts of parts arrangements give you a 1/10 brick horizontal offset, or a
half plate vertical offset, etc...)



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: LSC - request for defining a WORKING connection database standard
 
(...) While a connection database could be helpful, I just cant help thinking that a relationship/constrain system like solidworks and Pro/Engineer use could acheive a lot more. It could certainly be a start, then simplified - so the CAD (...) (19 years ago, 18-Jul-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.dev.lcd, lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw)

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