Playing acround with OpenCascade DRAWEXE

I haven’t gotten DRAWEXE to a point, that I would call fully operational. I’m still having problems when I open a terminal, and enter “pload ALL”. It returns the message ” Cannot load Debug Browser library. DFBrowser command is not attached” So far this problem doesn’t prevent the examples in the tutorial from working, so I’m going to ignore this till it becomes an issue. I’ve struggled so much, with trying to get this installed, I just want to relax working through the samples, hopefully without too much weird stuff happening.

I think, I being redundant, but my current game plane is work through the DRAWEXE tutorial until the next version in UBUNTU is released. Then I need to make a decision, on which of my PC’s I want to load Linux up on. At that point, I’m going to go into install the gnu C++ compiler, along with Anjuta 3 (which rumor has it is supposed to be sweet), and start playing around with the opencascade library. Since the name of this sight is metalshaperman, I thought it might be cool to make a solid model of my AMMCO metal shaper. Just a thought…

The way my brain is wired, it makes it easier for me to remember the stuff I learn when I write it down. When I first started linux, I hand wrote everything down on a paper pad, which works  great as long as you don’t loose the pad…

Transgressing a little bit, I enjoyed watching a program on PBS which talked about this junk yard, which had all these scrapped out parts from the Saturn V program. One thing that stuck in my mind was a comment about the lack of knowledge regarding the thought process behind the design of the Saturn V.  The drawings exist(maybe) to build another one, but my suspicion that the reason’s behind the plans are lost. I suppose maybe some of these guys had personal notebooks or have written memoir’s but I doubt it. Wouldn’t it be cool if engineers where  encouraged to keep developement blogs, on there projects….. Something tells me the lawyers would get involved and would put the kibosh on this, because of fear of product liability lawsuits. I can here it now. I see hear you knew, that this part could fatigue and fail…. Time to get back on track…

I’ve basically bookmarked the help file “file:///opt/OpenCASCADE6.2.0/doc/index.htm#Open_CASCADE_documentation.htm” to my browser for quick retrieval, I’m hanging out in the “Getting started”. “Experimenting with Draw Test Harness” section:
To use a this program, you need to open a terminal session and type in upper case “DRAWEXE”
then type in “pload ALL”
Command help is available by typing help and the the command. In this instance the pload is the command to load a plug in.
This exercise has you play around with a box and a cylinder. I think for now, I’m just going to list the commands discussed and what they do. You can go through the tutorial yourself.
(insert screen shot here)

axo : , One axonometric view
box : box name [x1 y1 z1] dx dy dz
fit : fit [view-id] hel
pcylinder : pcylinder name [plane(ax2)] R H [angle] (note to self need to research this more
clear : clear display
donly : donly [name1 name2 …], erase and display
“hir hir” this is supposed to be for hidden line removal, no help pops up??? but it works when I use it.

Somewhere in the documentation I read that the command syntax of DRAWEXE is based on tcl/tl . tcl is pronounced as tickle. I think I need to stop here. I need to research the link and play around with these first commands. The main reason is that I tried the next section “Running demonstration files” last night and it was generating errors left and right. I’m just not up with dealing with that at the moment. Besides its Sunday and the family wants attention. More later…..

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *