Team 254 Open-Source Release: Cheesy Parts

[DampRobot]

Originally Posted by Zach O

Just curious - has anyone tried setting this up locally yet?

Yes, although unsuccessfully so far. I'm trying to set it up in windows 7.

[tickspe15]

is the PDM software part of the package?

[tim-tim]

Originally Posted by tickspe15

is the PDM software part of the package?

I don't think so. I'm fairly confident the PDM software they use id available from SolidWorks. As of now, there is no direct integration between Cheesy Parts and the PDM. They are not linked.

[protoserge]

Has anyone tried this out yet? http://www.openplm.org/trac This might be a more interesting example: http://www.openplm.org/example3D/mendelmax2.html


I love how clean and intuitive Cheesy Parts is. Great work!

[nicolelin]

Originally Posted by Zach O

Just curious - has anyone tried setting this up locally yet?

Yeah, my team is going to try to integrate this system into our management of parts. We've got it running on Linux (Ubuntu). It's much easier to install MySQL and actually start playing around with it

This is a super great idea, and thanks to the Poofs for releasing this open-source.

[ejSabathia]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

One issue we have is Cheesy Parts getting out of sync with the CAD because some people are too lazy to create entries in it before saving their parts to PDM (cough EJ cough), so being able to query PDM and automagically create Cheesy Parts entries in that case would be nice.

In my defense, I was supposed to have an assistant for that...

[tim-tim]

Originally Posted by ejSabathia

In my defense, I was supposed to have an assistant for that...

You never gave me your login info...

[brennonbrimhall]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

Yeah, PDM integration is something I'd like to add if possible. One issue we have is Cheesy Parts getting out of sync with the CAD because some people are too lazy to create entries in it before saving their parts to PDM (cough EJ cough), so being able to query PDM and automagically create Cheesy Parts entries in that case would be nice. It's not going to be a walk in the cake, though, since the only way I've heard of to integrate with PDM is through some .NET DLL.

Forgive me – as I'm a programmer first and foremost, and know next to nothing about Solidworks (we use Autodesk) – but couldn't you do something with git? It might be easier than interfacing with PDM – as there are plenty of projects like Github, Gitorious, Gitlab, etc. which could be used as a reference point. You could even update the status of each part by a prefix in the commit message or something. Just a thought.

[DampRobot]

I got it working late last night!



The main workaround that it required on windows was adding Spork to the gemfile. I tried a lot of fixes (for gems not loading, rake related errors, etc.), and I'm not 100% sure which ones ended up contributing to it actually working. Hopefully, I'll install it on our windows PDM server in the next few weeks, as well as better document the process for beginners.

Thanks again to Pat Fairbank! His support and help was extremely valuable to me.

[Jon Jack]

Originally Posted by brennonbrimhall

Forgive me – as I'm a programmer first and foremost, and know next to nothing about Solidworks (we use Autodesk) – but couldn't you do something with git? It might be easier than interfacing with PDM – as there are plenty of projects like Github, Gitorious, Gitlab, etc. which could be used as a reference point. You could even update the status of each part by a prefix in the commit message or something. Just a thought.

If you were interested in just checking in and out files, then yes you could use Git. However, Git is intended to be used with text files, not binary files like the ones created by SolidWorks.

In SolidWorks different files are associated with each other. For example, an Assembly will have many parts associated with it. Git has no way of recognizing these types of relationships. So if I'm using Git and I wanted to check out an assembly and all the parts associated with it, then I'd have to manually check out each part. If I wanted to do this in PDM then all I'd have to do is check out the assembly and check a box that checks out all associated files.

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by Jon Jack

If you were interested in just checking in and out files, then yes you could use Git. However, Git is intended to be used with text files, not binary files like the ones created by SolidWorks.

In SolidWorks different files are associated with each other. For example, an Assembly will have many parts associated with it. Git has no way of recognizing these types of relationships. So if I'm using Git and I wanted to check out an assembly and all the parts associated with it, then I'd have to manually check out each part. If I wanted to do this in PDM then all I'd have to do is check out the assembly and check a box that checks out all associated files.

Plus Git's distributed nature makes it particularly ill-suited to storing CAD files (compared to SVN, for example). When you clone a Git repo, you're not only copying all the binary part/assembly files it contains, you're also downloading all their previous revisions in their entirety, since binary files don't diff well. This is probably measured in the tens of GB by the time a robot design nears completion.

[brennonbrimhall]

Originally Posted by Jon Jack

If you were interested in just checking in and out files, then yes you could use Git. However, Git is intended to be used with text files, not binary files like the ones created by SolidWorks.

In SolidWorks different files are associated with each other. For example, an Assembly will have many parts associated with it. Git has no way of recognizing these types of relationships. So if I'm using Git and I wanted to check out an assembly and all the parts associated with it, then I'd have to manually check out each part. If I wanted to do this in PDM then all I'd have to do is check out the assembly and check a box that checks out all associated files.

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

Plus Git's distributed nature makes it particularly ill-suited to storing CAD files (compared to SVN, for example). When you clone a Git repo, you're not only copying all the binary part/assembly files it contains, you're also downloading all their previous revisions in their entirety, since binary files don't diff well. This is probably measured in the tens of GB by the time a robot design nears completion.

Gotcha -- thanks for the feedback and explanation.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Jon Jack

If you were interested in just checking in and out files, then yes you could use Git. However, Git is intended to be used with text files, not binary files like the ones created by SolidWorks.

In SolidWorks different files are associated with each other. For example, an Assembly will have many parts associated with it. Git has no way of recognizing these types of relationships. So if I'm using Git and I wanted to check out an assembly and all the parts associated with it, then I'd have to manually check out each part. If I wanted to do this in PDM then all I'd have to do is check out the assembly and check a box that checks out all associated files.

There is a tool called git-annex that is meant to work with large binary files. I haven't personally set up a repository but I have had the experience of using it for a project at work. We were using it to track multiple terabytes of video data and it worked well.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

Yeah, PDM integration is something I'd like to add if possible. One issue we have is Cheesy Parts getting out of sync with the CAD because some people are too lazy to create entries in it before saving their parts to PDM (cough EJ cough), so being able to query PDM and automagically create Cheesy Parts entries in that case would be nice. It's not going to be a walk in the cake, though, since the only way I've heard of to integrate with PDM is through some .NET DLL.

We're using a t1.micro EC2 instance running Ubuntu 12.04. It would probably be fairly trivial to deploy Cheesy Parts instead as a Heroku or AppFog app, though -- I just like the extra control that a virtual private server provides.

Thank you for posting this!

We're going to deploy this on Heroku and try to set it up. Our lead CAD mentor might be in touch with you guys for running PDM. We had a lot of issues with it last year and have abandoned it for now (Using Google Drive instead).

Also, for what it is worth, https://www.digitalocean.com is cheaper than Amazon for micro instance sized stuff and provides roughly the same amount of control. We run our primary site off of digital ocean. It's really because I'm a Linux Container nerd though and not so much about the price.

Also, it just so happens our other main mentor is a Ruby wizard so she is taking on setting this up on Heroku.

Again, thank you for posting this.

[Jared]

I'm having a hard time installing this. I've done it in the past on ubuntu, and everything worked the first time perfectly, but now I'm installing it on new machine, which doesn't have all the dependencies I usually work with.

When I run "bundle exec rake db:migrate", it fails, with the error "cannot load such file -- db". I've tried with ruby 1.9.1 and 1.9.3, and the same error happens. What am I missing?