The colours came as a bit of a shock but after a few seconds I warmed to them. I love the retro feel, ESPECIALLY the 5 1/4 inch floppy. What a pleasant surprise! First time I've seen Sketchup used for 2D too

I thought png didn't do transparency... my bad. I've always found transparency tricky to work with, though if the other icons have transparent backgrounds it would clearly be the most correct. Imagine if SU9 changed its colour theme to green Our buttons would be the only grey ones. How dire that would be

Don't be so hard on yourself. I'm just glad to have your help. Just one thing... If you are going to edit it please don't make the background white. Use the same grey as the rest of the sketchup icons otherwise it'll look out of place.

Mmm... Indeed you would get that error. At the moment the plugin is only really usable by people who are comfortable editing some ruby. postprocessor.rb is trying to save the CNC files to my directory ("c:\Users\Noel\CNC"). If you want to give it a shot, scan through the file. You should be able to spot the paths. Look for the double slashes (Mac unfriendly as Tim pointed out).

I'm working on making it all MUCH easier to edit. Keep you posted.

No offence was taken! The japanese just says I'm a carpenter too and lived (a short period of time) in Osaka a few years back. I was also not left unmoved by Japanese craftmanship when it comes to woodworking. We even ended up selling one of their products a few years back, here in Europe. http://mitaka.eu/
It's still the traditional side that gets to the heart

大工ですか。すごい。何年前日本に住んだけど。大阪に。それに、私も大工ですよ。面白い、なぁ。
Anyhow, I'm not advocating for this type of code, though I think it's cool that ruby allows for it. All I wanted was a list of cool lines that one might copy and paste into the console to do something useful. Instead it would seem I've started a flame war or something

ANNOUCEMENT:
The project's first tutorial/screencast. Here is hoping it gives you some idea of what the plugin does.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/106243199685455140135/posts/9xCjXqFJkug

I'm just glad to have something to use! Anything is better than the blank icons I am currently using. Scott's doing a fine job.

You got it TIG. Could you suggest a way to rephrase the whole "challenge" so it is readily apparent?

Before trying anything else I tried scaling your icon (without the text) in Paint. I was surprised how well it scaled (Maybe Paint got better with windows7). I don't think we'll be able to do much better that this.

On a more general note, your icon was very detailed. Perhaps too detailed for something to be viewed at 24x24. I think icons are meant to be more symbolic. But NO MATTER. The Sketchup eraser, for instance, looks nothing like an eraser I've ever seen. But it doesn't matter because after you know what it is and does and you recognise it immediately. The icons you're designing will work a charm as long as they are distinguishable and recognizable. So thanks for the work!

What it returns is irrelevant. It's what it does that matters, Dan. Please see attatched video for proof (Sorry its in wmv). There was a moment of fear when the code did nothing. Then I realised I had nothing selected

I know it is bothersome when people post code that doesn't work. I'm sory if I didn't explain myself correctly giving the impression that that was the case. It is also, however bothersome when people say
@dan rathbun said:

YOUR CODE DOES NOT WORK !
without considering the possibility that it might.

Rest assured I shall be checking the oneliners people post before I include it in my first post.

oneliner.wmv

@dan rathbun said:

The each iterator returns the receiver (upon which it acts,) not the result of the block.

Try using one of the iterators from the Enumerable mixin module (which is mixed into most of the API collection classes.)

I might as well give it to you:

find_faces_of_selected_entities = Sketchup.active_model.selection.find_all {|ent| ent.is_a?(Sketchup::Face)}

I was unaware of the find_all method. You live and learn. The one-liner you propose, however, does nothing. It would be useful in the context of more code. I think the problem is the variable name I chose. It is misleading. Here is the original code I posted

find_faces_of_selected_entities = Sketchup::active_model.selection.each{|ent| ent.find_faces if ent.is_a?(Sketchup::Edge)}

I say find_faces_of_selected_entities because the Edge class has the find_faces() method. I think both should be renamed to reconstruct_faces or something. In the hope everything is more clear we'll get rid of the variable alltogether. I'm changing my first post to...

#Reconstruct all possible faces from selection
Sketchup::active_model.selection.each{|ent| ent.find_faces if ent.is_a?(Sketchup::Edge)}

Try it out. Draw something, delete a few faces, select everything and run the one-liner.

Here is a chance to show off your ruby skills. One line of code that does something cool that you can copy and paste into the console. I'll keep editing this post adding your contributions so you can find the one-liners easily. The first is mine (very simple I know).

Reconstruct all possible faces from selected entities
Sketchup::active_model.selection.each{|ent| ent.find_faces if ent.is_a?(Sketchup::Edge)}

Run this befor printing
(av = Sketchup.active_model.active_view).camera.perspective = false; av.zoom_extents.zoom(1.052)

And here is a challenge: ArcCurves get lost on solid operations. Can you recreate them in one line of ruby? (Hint: If 3 or more edges are on the same plane and the angle between each is the same and less than or equal to 15, we can assume it is part of a lost ArcCurve)

GIMP is an opensource project similar to photoshop. http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html It has a steep learning curve and I actually don't recommend it unless you want to design a brochure or poster or something. It's just too powerful. For scaling something like this icon we want I suggest something more user friendly like Picasa. It'll do nicely.

While were on the subject of scaling, in case you ever need to enlarge an image, check this little project out...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/imageenlarger/ Cool stuff

Can you believe it never occured to me to design the icons in sketchup? Live and learn. If you remove the text (I doubt it'll be legible at 24x24), zoom out till it's the same size as the icons in sketchup, hit the print screen or "prt scr" button on you keyboard (One never knows if one is being condescending), then just paste it into paint or whatever application, you should be set to go. Scaling images can be tricky. Paint will mess up your resolution by essentially deciding "this pixel goes this one can stay", while apps like GIMP will scale smoothly, merging pixels together.

Great start. Could you also attatch the skp file so I can include it in the source code? If you like, I'll take care of getting the png file from the model. Do you think you could model the other 4 icons?

PS: did you get the drill bit from the warehouse? I wouldn't know where to begin to get a spiral!

Hi there alpmeadow.
Googled Carvewright. Cool gadget, though I'm not sure I like the way jobs are transferred to it. Is that a cartridge? There is a fair chance it still uses gcode to operate. I'm guessing that the files are mysteriously put on the cartridge by the software to avoid people tampering with them. If you can't see the contents of the cartridge from windows/mac, you might try the following...
Download ubuntu, burn to a CD, boot your computer into ubuntu (You don't have to install it) and plug-in you cartridge reader and see if you can read it's contents. Linux is always a little more hacker friendly.
If you can't get access to the cartridge, this thread will be of little use to you.

I know some people have been having trouble getting hold of the code. I have added a download tab to the project site http://code.google.com/p/minivistii/downloads/list to make it easier for people to download and try out. I'll try and keep it up to date with the source code but am giving no guarantees.

If you are interested in contributing to the code base you are going to have to use GIT. I use the follwing setup
Sketchup + Eclipse + Sketchup bridge + EGit
It's fast and efficient. If you don't know what these things are or how to use them, let me know and I'll help get it up and running. I don't know what your current setup is but if it's notepad or webconsole, you'll be shocked at the up in productivity you get!

Here is a little teaser of something I recently manufactured from within Sketchup. It was made possible thanks to another free plugin (bezier curves).
https://plus.google.com/u/0/106243199685455140135/posts/Sdisrj9khY6
I'll be publishing a screen cast soon enough

So, if i understand correctly, you are only capable of manufacturing whole cabinets. You can't program a couple of hole and a toolpath with a cabinet software solution. I suspect though, there should be some rudimentary application installed on the computer that atually controls the machine that should allow you to program individual operations.

Nonetheless your ecabinet solution generates NC files for your CNC (I very much doubt it exports to DXF). Try designing a ridiculously simple cabinet with no shelves and no door and send me the NC file/files generated from it. I should be able to work out a fair ammount from that.

PS: If your CNC machine also works with job lists, send me that file too.

Hi there Scott.

Well, your CNC is certainly a lot closer to ours than a DIY CNC. The auto tool length sounds really cool (wish I had it!).

The way I understand, it Gcode is NC format. You can organise DXF files in such a way that your CNC machine "imports" them by following polylines according to layer and drilling holes where circles are drawn. I always had the feeling that this was kind of a botch job and haven't really looked into it in any detail.

Indeed, this plugin generates NC files, not DXFs. The way I went about it was simply reverse engineering (Sounds cool but it was my first attempt at it). I defined a simple toolpath from (100,100,19) to (200,200,19) and a simple 5mm diameter hole (50,50,19). I then looked at the file in notepad and with the help of wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-code I started figuiring out what each part did. It's a lot simpler than it sounds.

If you send me a NC file with the toolpath and hole I have specified above, I'll let you know how easy/difficult it will be to get a postprocessor working for you.