Maslow Create - Alpha Release šŸŽ‰

Software Maslow Create
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But I want to do a complete hardware redesign before we have to worry about those issues :grin:

For now, I think we can handle designs for a whole lot of cool furniture, boats, and other things which fit on a few sheets of plywood!

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Sure, of course best practices in programming come into play here too. Break things into constituent parts and build in a modular fashion. The way youā€™re working with atoms and molecules already suggests this, which is good. Even with compiling, it might be better too think in terms of compiling in batches of components rather than compiling everything in one go. So if you have three types of walls in your project, you can generate cut files for all walls only and come back to generate cut files for all windows when youā€™re ready to work on windows. Like working with components in Sketchup. Talking about Sketchup, this being an open source project, we probably should borrow from their permissive plugin system which allows users to create and share plugins that extend the main appā€™s functionalities. As with Sketchup though, guarding against bloat would be a source of concern, ditto balancing that level of openness against an uncomfortable user experience where you have to download, install and manage too many plugins before you can feel comfortable using the tool.

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For something big like a house I donā€™t think we want to render the full house at full resolution. Iā€™m imagining that as you zoomed in we will ramp up the detail on that part.

This

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So @bar, what is your vision for MaslowCreate development? Iā€™m guessing youā€™re thinking of an open-source, community driven development process.

This is going to be a very different type of development than the Maslow CNC firmware and Ground Control. Lots of features to add, with a danger of feature overload.

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Excellent question!!

Of course it is an open project and all help is much appreciated.

Preventing feature overload is going to be very important to maintaining a positive user experience. I am imagining a system similar to the way programming languages operate. The core language is kept simple, but many many more features are available as libraries.

When you right click to place a new atom you can either place one of the basic atoms like circle or extrude, or you can load any other project from GitHub as an atom. That means that to add say a rotational pattern feature to Create all you need to do is create a new project called ā€œRotational Patternā€ and set it up with the inputs and output you want to make copies and rotate a part. That feature is then available to everyone else right away. Search results are sorted by how many stars each project has so hopefully the most common ones will float to the top.

Itā€™s confusing in words, but I will make a quick video to explain it which I think will be easy to understand.

The ā€˜Codeā€™ type atom letā€™s you enter JSxCAD JavaScript code directly which I think will be very useful for building new libraries

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I have never understood CAD programs. I remember having a great time designing in SketchUp when I knew how to have a free version. This was many years ago and I was only designing something for me to reference and physically build. I didnā€™t have a machine that would help me at the time.
Now it seems the only programs I understand how to use are paint and ez paint.
I draw a shape in paint,
Take the .png to inkscape and Trace bitmapā€¦ Making .svg,
Take .svg to makerCAM assign tool paths generate G-Codeā€¦ Saving .nc,
& Open .nc in ground control.
So far, for my making level, 2D+ has been sufficient.
THIS IS ONE OF MY SUGGESTIONS :grin:
I would like to have the one stop shop for all of the above process.
I donā€™t even understand how to design in inkscape. In MakerCAM I can pull off some circles and rectangles.
I know we canā€™t hold everyone back based on the ones like me but if that could happen as well as the more advanced stuff that I can grow into, THAT WOULD BE GREAT! :grinning:

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Iā€™m finally getting a chance totake a look at this.t sounds lke you are takng an
approach very similar to what openscad is doing, if you can end up compatible
with that file format, it would be a great thng as it would mean there are
already a bunch of programs that can use it (you can upload scad files to
thingiverse and use the content creator to let people customize the object for
example)

OpenSCAD is very much designed for programmers (you edit the text and it shows
you what the results are). Maslow create is taking a GUI approach and now
showing the underlying text (but showing a graphical representation), which is
much friendlier approach for most people.

Even if you donā€™t commit to implementing everything in the language, making
maslow create files be valid subsets of the SCD language would be good

OpenSCAN language definition:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/The_OpenSCAD_Language

There is a javascript CAD version that works with openscad at
https://openjscad.org/

license compatbility

OpenSCAD is GPLv2, not GPLv3 so if you want to be able to share code,the maslow
create license should change (much easier now than after there are a lot of
contributers), Iā€™ll need to dig a bit more to check if itā€™s GPLv2only or GPLv2+

openjscad is MIT, so it can be included into GPLv2 or v3 but code canā€™t flow
back the other way without it being explicitly allowed (which we should do by
default if we want to copy their work)

David Lang

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@bar ,
@jwolter posted some inspiration from the 80ā€™s on another thread.
Looking at the simplicity of the drawing program and how it translates to the machine is part of my dream machine!
Multi-Color Pen Holder with Automatic Pen Change

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Any pointers on how to get up to speed on how JSxCAD works? Thereā€™s not much to go by on the repo, and the discussion group linked from there doesnā€™t seem to exist.

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I have no experiance with jscad, thereā€™s a lot more stuff out there that
supports scan than the javafied version. jscad is interesting as a possible
source of code, but it ould need to be adapted to standard scad format.

David Lang

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The big push this week in that project is getting the documentation written so it exists but since itā€™s a work in progress I donā€™t think there are any public links to it yet. You can check out the in progress version here:

https://jsxcad.js.org/app/UserGuide.html

Any feedback on what is confusing or how it could be improved would be much appreciated. That fresh perspective of reading documentation for the first time is hard to get back.

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Thanks, that should help for a start. Iā€™ll feedback on anything that catches my attention.

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I have updated the version of Maslow Create on www.MaslowCreate.org with a lot of bug fixes. I am still finding a lot of bugs pretty much any time I do anything and expect a lot more fixes going forwards.

Here are the changes since the last update:

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Iā€™ve made a bunch more bug fixes most of which have to do with increasing the speed at which projects load. JSxCAD now run much faster also (not my work) so todayā€™s update is a big performance increase which translates to more complex models loading faster.

Another thing I have been working on is the behavior for sharing projects. Check out https://maslowcreate.org/run/?182022403 to see an example in practice. Every project automatically comes with a sharing link like that. Change the values for the table height or wood thickness over on the left side and the model updates.

image
image.png1366Ɨ688 48.8 KB

Now I just need to get a ā€œDownload Gocdeā€ button going over there on the left side so you can easily take the project and cut it out.

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@bar, tomorrow will be two months since the Maslow Create alpha release. How are things going?

EDIT: Oh! Just saw your reply on the other topic we were just on! :smile:

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Things are going, but more slowly than I would like ideally. The full log of what has changed is available here: Pulse Ā· MaslowCNC/Maslow-Create Ā· GitHub

Iā€™ve also gotten really excited about working on an esp32 based firmware for a four motor machine so thatā€™s been taking up some of my time.

In the last week Iā€™ve mostly been working on boring stuff like documentation. All of the code is now documented and up to date documentation is automatically generated at Home | canvas-template which should make it easier for others to understand the code and contribute.

A couple new features this week are that the grid under the part now scales automatically as you zoom in and out, and that automatic Bill of Materials and README generation are now working so a project like this Maslow Create now has a Bill Of Materials and a README button which will take you to documentations for the project.

JSXCAD has seen some HUGE performance increases in the last few weeks so projects load much faster, but in the process we broke STL generation so actually exporting a project into a usable format is not working :cry:

Iā€™ve agreed to teach a class on how it works to design and cut some new furniture for a local makerspace at the beginning of August so Iā€™ve got a hard deadline to get everything playing nice and exporting Gcode.

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I donā€™t get anything close to what you are displaying when I follow the link.https://maslowcreate.org/run/?182022403 I got maslowcreate to work finally in chrome, and am playing with trying to recreate the pen holder. So far w/out reading any help docs, I like it better then freecad which I canā€™t even figure out how to make a circle in that program. No less create the parts needed for the pen holder.

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Iā€™m sorry, I broke that link recently but I am working on getting it fixed again in the next couple days. Basically making a CAD/CAM program is turning out to be harder than I initially guessed. Iā€™m making a lot of progress, but itā€™s all still VERY alpha and in flux.

Help docs and a walk through for creating a design from beginning to end are on the way as soon as everything stops changing so quickly. Right now features appear and disappear and break every few days which would make the help docs out of date right away.

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No problem, youā€™d be surprised how often the software tools at my work break, and people get paid to keep them running. :slight_smile: I do find the tool very easy to use and like I said so far I seem to be able to recreate the basic pen holder w/o too much trouble and this is from a CNC newb. I think it is great. Is there a specific web browser you believe it would work best with?

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Thanks for understanding! :heart:

I think the table link should be working now.

Let me know if it is still not working?

I would absolutely love feedback about what you like and donā€™t like. I test in Firefox and Chrome usually so those should be working always, but the goal is to to support every browser so if you find something broken tell me and I will work on fixing it ASAP.

The roadmap right now is to get bent parts working for sheetmetal or living hinge type thingsā€¦then to work on laying parts out on a sheet and generating gcode automatically.

The goal is that a link like that table will come with a ā€œdownload gcodeā€ button so you can enter parameters like the thickness of the wood and then click one button to be ready to cut.

There arenā€™t any help docs yet (other than the very technical Home | canvas-template), but I am here to answer questions!