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We used to call it decimal inches in Australia too.
Dan, back in the early 1990s, I once had to quote on a part for a really old ship of a British design, probably dating back to about the 1940's or so, when the drawing arrived in the office it was in fractional inches! Can you imagine a precision item including bearings with tolerances and all in fractions! What a nightmare.
As this is my first encounter with FreeCAD, I am a bit confused about the status of "inch" units.
I need "inch" units. It is not worth it to me to learn FreeCAD if it doesn't support "inch" units. Rather than supporting feet, or fractions of inches, inch and decimal of inch is plenty.
If you get rid of the non-base 10 stuff of the imperial system, then the conversion to use alternative units should be really easy. If "units"* is soft-defined and if the label for those units is soft-defined, then the existing software should be great.
The only changes required would be on output, especially 3d printer output. However, even here, the file could be saved as it currently is (with a units marker ideally), and the conversion from metric to other units would be made at output time.
* Other units that may be nice include thousandth, and ten-thousandth. For larger projects, the foot (not inch) might be nice.
danielfalck wrote:I vote for a Decimal inch schema as well. I work in a machine shop environment and that is what we call it. We have to switch between metric and inch units a lot there and I don't worry about foot, yards etc- just inches or mm. Most of our digital measuring equipment will switch between units (decimal units that is) but not foot, yards. It's all just a matter of mulitplying by 25.4 for me.
Moved:
SchemaDecimalInch should be:
value < 0.0001" => 0.nnnn in. (may be scientific notation)
value < 0.001" => n tenths
value < 0.0" => nnn thou
value >= 0.0" => n.nn in. (may be scientific notation)
Area,Volumes, etc as in SchemaImperial1
There is another problem with the input field. E.g. the input field for the grid is supposed to work for lengths but you can enter any kind of valid quantity and it accept this input. So, you can enter "25 l" which in this context doesn't make sense. So, shouldn't the input field have a way to accept input of only a certain unit?
I have implemented a special validator similar to that used in a QDoubleSpinBox which now disallows to enter values out of range. There we could also do the matching of the units.
Hello all,
Totally new to FreeCAD, looks really nice. But why is it when i select Imperial as my units and draw a 1" square, that the square actually measures 25.4?
Using Windows7 Pro 64 bit.
Thanks for any info,
Troy
You have not mentioned your FreeCAD version. Imperial units is only supported in the current development release. The available Windows development versions are outdated now and may lack some units support.
The "stable" version of v0.14 is about to be released, it will include what's been discussed in this topic.
