ASCII stl selection when exporting

[CharlieMAC]

Hi guys!

I had a bad time trying to export the freecad's parts into STL that were compatible with some utility programs for Matlab/Simulink. Matlab can actually handle STL in binary format, but no these useful programs. So, after hours trying with the classic File->Export, I found out that the Mesh workbench had the tool to export the parts into ASCII STL, but it actually took me take quite a long time to find this tool.

So, it would be useful that the file selection dialog (file-> export) had a checkbox to switch from binary STL to ASCII STL. That's all.

Best regards,

Charlie

[NormandC]

Hello Charlie,

Seems like a reasonable request to me, if others agree with me, you could create a feature request on the bug tracker. Otherwise I'm afraid your request may be quickly forgotten.

I've been thinking an Export/Import page on the wiki listing all the possible options may be a good idea...

Cheers,

Norm

[bejant]

Feature requested as issue #1586.

[virengos]

Hi,
(1)
I don't really now if this the best practice, but it works for me:

At daily work with FreeCAD, working on preprocessing for CFD tasks a lot of different files are being exported, all the files needs to be in ASCII format in order to be editable later.
At first I export the files as AST (.ast) format and change the file extension in my file explorer to STL (.stl) format (Windows Explorer, Dolphin on Linux, whatever), this works fine for me ! For a large bunch of files I also use a Visual Basic Macro to change the extensions or a Python script to modify the region names inside the files (needed for my CFD meshing workflow).

(2)
One additional question / feature request:
When using the 'Mesh Design' module It would be very helpful to have an additional text field to define the region name inside the AST / STL file. See also attached screenshots.

What is your opinion ?

system info:
OS: Windows 7
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.16.6706 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: releases/FreeCAD-0-16
Hash: f86a4e411ff7848dea98d7242f43b7774bee8fa0
Python version: 2.7.8
Qt version: 4.8.7
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 6.8.0.oce-0.17

[wmayer]

Since v0.17 for the export to an obj file the label of the mesh in the tree view is used. This could also be done for the export to ASCII STL.