BOLTS Open Library of Technical Specifications

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jreinhardt
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Re: BOLTS Open Library of Technical Specifications

Post by jreinhardt »

Excellent! I added it, will be included in the next development snapshot, but is already on the web page:

http://jreinhardt.github.io/BOLTS/html/ ... anges.html

Thanks a lot!
BOLTS, standard parts library for FreeCAD Thread, Help with Translation
jreinhardt
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Re: BOLTS Open Library of Technical Specifications

Post by jreinhardt »

It was very quiet in this thread for a long time. But this does not mean that nothing happened.

I am currently in the last strokes of a pretty big overhaul of BOLTS. Highlights include:

* A proper naming system that treats parts that are not specified by a standard (i.e. parts from a specific vendor) as first class citizens.
* Possibility to group several standards together (i.e. washers DIN 125 A and DIN 125 B).
* Better generated OpenSCAD code
* A cleaner design of the datastructures, which should make extensions much easier.
* A reorganised website, that is no longer statically generated and hosted on GitHub, but based on Flask. This opens up many possibilities for the web site. One example is
* Translation infrastructure for website, documentation and part data.

The branch is not yet merged into master, but you can check out the new website here:

http://bolts-library.org

It looks very much like the old one, but under the hood it is completely different. There are some rough edges still, for example no easy way to switch languages. At the moment it detect the preferred language once and then keeps it. The only way to change it is to replace the language code in the url. Currently supported are en, de, fr and es, the four most popular languages for the old site. But only de is partially translated, the rest falls back to en. I will try to setup a weblate instance at some point to crowd source translations.
BOLTS, standard parts library for FreeCAD Thread, Help with Translation
ickby
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Re: BOLTS Open Library of Technical Specifications

Post by ickby »

nice! I'm looking forward to see bolts growing and have it included in freecad some day!
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yorik
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Re: BOLTS Open Library of Technical Specifications

Post by yorik »

Excellent! Me too I'd like to see this included in FreeCAD by default. Not all BOLTS of course, I think its strength is also that it is host-independent, but, let's say, the main macro would be included into FreeCAD, and on first run, it would download/update the entire contents, or something like that...

Actually, no, I change my mind. The big strength of BOLTS is the minutious care you make and maintain it. That makes it really a high-quality thing.
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jriegel
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Re: BOLTS Open Library of Technical Specifications

Post by jriegel »

I think BOLTS should be a own module in FreeCAD. Since the buatifull design its very lightwaight ( The actuall list of parameters is nearly nothing to distribute).

I thought about building a feature in Assembly for it, but actually its so general that it deserves a own module/workbench. This kind of standard parts are so important to day to day design work, that it makes sense to deliver it always in the standard installation. We can think of an update service to get newer or rewised parameter lists, but we should deliver it by default.
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saso
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Re: BOLTS Open Library of Technical Specifications

Post by saso »

I sometimes question a bit the meaningful number of wb and think if some could be removed/merged, so I wonder if the right way would be a more general Library wb with BOLTS, Arch and all the other possible elements/parts. One could even imagine for it to have a way for users to suggest their parts to be included in the official library directly from that wb and yes as suggested having the option to update/refresh the local with the online version... But yes, it would absolutely be great to have this by default.
jreinhardt
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Re: BOLTS Open Library of Technical Specifications

Post by jreinhardt »

Integrating BOLTS into FreeCAD is near the top of my todo list. But I first want to finish the new webpage and the migration and a few other things.

BOLTS would be a module, not a workbench. In which way it would be integrated into workbenches is a different question. Building a unified UI for both FreeCAD library and BOLTS is an interesting idea. In general I would be very grateful for help with brushing up the UI, as this is not my strong side.
BOLTS, standard parts library for FreeCAD Thread, Help with Translation
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jriegel
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Re: BOLTS Open Library of Technical Specifications

Post by jriegel »

For me some Parts of Bolds would be rather a feature, so you could change some parameter later in the game. E.g. you put in a (Assembly)Feature screw and find out you need a longer one. So you just go into the Feature parameter and change it. In Assembly the features make the most sense, since you can do additional computation with the information, e.g. put a

By the way. Do you intend to have also the different length of the e.g. screws (catalog list)...?
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jreinhardt
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Re: BOLTS Open Library of Technical Specifications

Post by jreinhardt »

Hey everybody,

some more news on the new website (http://www.bolts-library.org/):
  • I migrated the web site to bootstrap to make it "responsive", i.e. usable from both desktop computers as well as tablets and mobile devices. So please take all your devices that are capable of displaying websites and browse around the site a bit and tell me if something looks weird, the layout is broken or something else is wrong.
  • Also added a full-text search that indexes the Documentation and the parts data (and plays well with the translations). It is not yet very useful for languages other than English, because there are not many translations, only a bit of german,
  • There is a weblate running for translating BOLTS into German, Spanish and French (the most popular languages for the people visiting the old website): https://weblate.stbuehler.de/projects/BOLTS/ The three subprojects are for the strings on the website, the part names and the documentation. One can suggest translations without being registered or logged in, to validate these one needs to register with a Google or GitHub account. I would be very grateful for help with french and spanish, as I don't speak these very well. Other languages can be added if necessary.
jriegel wrote:By the way. Do you intend to have also the different length of the e.g. screws (catalog list)...?
I have a way of storing this information (http://www.bolts-library.org/en/blog/20 ... gress.html) in the blt files, and for some parts this is already available, but I don't use it in the GUI or show it on the website yet.
BOLTS, standard parts library for FreeCAD Thread, Help with Translation
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NormandC
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Re: BOLTS Open Library of Technical Specifications

Post by NormandC »

Hello Johannes,

Tonight I tried to help a French forum user by translating the install instructions on your website, and testing the install at the same time (on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-Bit). I installed the python-yaml package, but launching the macro threw an error in the python console.

Code: Select all

uic import failed. Make sure that the pyside tools are installedTraceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/normand/Dessins/Macros_FreeCAD/start_bolts.FCMacro", line 1, in <module>
    import BOLTS
  File "/home/normand/Dessins/Macros_FreeCAD/BOLTS/__init__.py", line 40, in <module>
    from gui.freecad_bolts import BoltsWidget
  File "/home/normand/Dessins/Macros_FreeCAD/BOLTS/gui/freecad_bolts.py", line 29, in <module>
    Ui_BoltsWidget,QBoltsWidget = uic.loadUiType(join(bolts_path,'bolts_widget.ui'))
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
<type 'exceptions.ImportError'>: No module named pysideuic
So obviously pyside tools need to be installed as well. But there's a big hurdle (for me) on Ubuntu: the python-tools package lists the python-pyside metapackage as recommends, and Ubuntu treats recommended packages as dependencies by default.

This results in a huge list of packages to be installed, including phonon, the KDE multimedia backend. :roll: Without going needlessly into desktop wars, anything that forces installation of KDE-related libraries on my system is a show stopper. :evil:

Fortunately I found here a way to install pyside-tools without recommends but this is not very user-friendly, and I'm not sure it's a good idea to suggest that to end users.
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