Automatically Plating STLs within a specified area

Hi,

Printing a single object is simple enough, but now that my printer is giving consistently solid prints I'm more and more printing full plates with 10-15 STL objects laid out on the print bed.

My question is as follows:
Is there any software / anyone working on a piece of software that will take a list of 100 STL files in a print queue and attempt to place as many as possible of them within a print area of defined size (my bed is 140x140x120 on my printrbot and 200mm diameter on my rostock).

If not does anyone know what scripting language to use to do this so I can work on it myself.


hugh

OpenSCAD (if it can read the STL files).

---

Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
BLOG - PHOTOS - Thingiverse

I didn't realise OpenSCAD supported basic logic - if,for...

Can you point me to a ready written script? If not I'll start programming it tonight.

Printing Plate Wizard by Starno

---

Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
BLOG - PHOTOS - Thingiverse

Brilliant!!! I will have a look at that tonight and see if I can include it into botqueue.com - This would seriously speed up my printing.

You could use AWK (or any other scripting language) to create this file based on the STL files contained in a directory.

---

Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
BLOG - PHOTOS - Thingiverse

As far as software to automatically optimize the platter space for as many parts as possible, I think there may be a patent on that, if true you won't see that feature in software we use yet.

Haha!! there is no way that is patentable!

Either way I'm going to write my own but its a case of a simple bin packing problem. I just wasn't sure if anyone had done it and if not what software to start with.

Could you please point me to the patent in question?

in openscad does anyone know how to do the following:
import(a.stl);
import(b.stl);
if(intersection(a,b)){
translate(a,10,0,0);
}

its the if intersection check i cant get right?

There is no intersection() function in opencsad. There is a module which makes an object that is the intersection of two as in : -

intersection() {
    import(a.stl); 
    import(b.stl);
}

But you can't use a module in an expression.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

The Intersection function is a CSG operation, it gives you the object formed by the overlapping portions of all the objects you feed it. There doesn't seem to be a way to ask if two objects are intersecting. OpenSCAD may not be the right tool for this job.

Is there another way?

If you know python, you might be able to use plater.py, part of printrun, as a starting point for the tool you want to create. It can already import, auto-arrange and export a plate of stls, but I don't know how optimal its arrangements are or how much it would take to create something to output a near optimal set of plates from a large set of stls.

To be honest although a near optimum solution would be great I'd be happy with a basic one to start with. I will have a look at plater.py but I'm a java developer so I guess we'll see. I'll post my results tomorrow night (it's 2am here in england).
Thanks for all the help guys.