Problems with rendering Mendel90

Hi Nophead, hi everyone! First off, thank you so much for all your hard work!

I'm about to build a Mendel90 (my first printer), but today I ran into a snag. I was able to run "make_machine.py mendel" (side note, It took me quite some time to figure out how to do it, and I can't seem to run that command again, when I try, it ignores that I typed mendel, and gives me the command parameters again, as shown here: [puu.sh]).

Anyway, I ran main.scad, but after it was at 27% for a few minutes, it crashed with this message: [puu.sh] (yes I checked I have the correct runtime libraries). Before it crashed, I was able to copy the openscad console ( [pastebin.com]), however it seemed to be fine up until the last ~10 lines. It seemed to have finished everything, but then it broke somehow.

I'm running Win7 Pro, OpenSCAD 13.01.08, Python 2.7.3, the latest version of Inkscape, and I downloaded your files today. I also had a friend with a similar setup try it, and his crashed at the same spot. Thank you again for your time. I am building a mendel90 as somewhat of a "senior project" (I'm 17 and homeschooled). Take care!

I can't explain the first problem. It only gives the usage message if you don't give it any parameters, but I can see you gave it mendel, so it doesn't make sense. Also, if it worked once it should work again. It doesn't modify itself.

The second problem looks like you pressed F6. That tries to make one solid from the whole machine and goes away for ages and crashes. You should press F5 to render the assembly views. It will take about 10 minutes for the whole machine.

F6 is used for making STL files of the printed parts but you have to be viewing just the printed parts you want, not an assembly with all the vitamins in it.

---

[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

To work out what's wrong with make-machine.py, get the error message to print out the value of the variable it's looking at to determine what machine you want. It could be "" (blank) or it could be something mangled. That might help work out what's going wrong. But, as nop head says, that is very weird.

Gerv

How would I go about doing that? Sorry, I'm quite new to programming
Also nophead, thanks for the tip. It's working fine this time. (I remembered to make a backup), but I'm still going to try to figure out what happened so I can't run the command again.

Thanks!

make_machine.py is just this:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
from bom import boms
from sheets import sheets
from stls import stls
from plates import plates

def make_machine(machine):
    boms(machine)
    sheets(machine)
    stls(machine)
    plates(machine)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    if len(sys.argv) > 1:
        make_machine(sys.argv[1])
    else:
        print "usage: make_machine [mendel|sturdy|your_machine]"
        sys.exit(1)

Add print sys.argv after the print "usage"

I would say either Python is broken or the Windows shell is broken on you machine.

---

[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

I think I did what you asked (not entirely sure, as I've never done any programming before).

I changed:

if len(sys.argv) > 1:
make_machine(sys.argv[1])
else:
print "usage: make_machine [mendel|sturdy|your_machine]"
sys.exit(1)

to:

if len(sys.argv) > 1:
make_machine(sys.argv[1])
else:
print "usage: make_machine [mendel|sturdy|your_machine]"
print sys.argv
sys.exit(1)


and got: [puu.sh]

Was that the correct thing to do?

Thanks again (this isn't as big of an issue since I now have the model I can use, but I just want to fix any problems my computer might be having regarding running RepRap software).

I think perhaps your file associaltion for .py isn't passing the command line parameters.

Try:
python make_machine.py mendel

as a workround.

The file association should have something this as the action: "C:\Python27\python.exe" "%1" %*

I think yours must be missing the %* at the end.

---

[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

Ahh thank you python make_machine.py mendel does the trick!