new Measurement tool

[Zolko]

Hello,

I'm pleased to announce that a new version of Assembly 4 has been released, v0.9.5, with a new measurement tool, completely rewritten from the Caliper of the Manipulator WB. This tool can now measure almost everything that you throw at it. Works with assemblies and App::Link of course.

I'd be happy if people could test it and report all problems.

Measure.png (320.73 KiB) Viewed 2092 times

[carlopav]

Well done, it really looks promising!
Mind the tooltip in the toolbar, I think it is outdated.
on my screen the labels look quite big (cause the screen is small), not a big problem to me, but would be perhaps fine to tune them with some preferences

Edit: I played with it a bit more, and it's really nice.
I realized the tool creates an App::AnnotationLabel and a Part::Feature for every dimension entity to be displayed. A question out of curiosity to understand how you thought about it: wouldn't it be better to use a tracker that only rely on coin rather than an object that have a Part Shape?

[-alex-]

a new measurement tool, completely rewritten from the Caliper of the Manipulator WB. This tool can now measure almost everything that you throw at it.

Very nice tool, this improvement is very convenient. Works very well as far as I can test it.
Thanks a lot!

[HoWil]

Two things:

• If I select "Measure Distance" and select a point than "Button" for "First Element" gets disabled and the one for the "Second Element" gets selected. If I accidentally select a wrong first point, than it is not possible to simply select 'First Element' again or e.g. press Esc. "Reset" clears all my measurements I have done before... thats not an solution.
• Nice to see that this tool is further improved... but wouldn't it be better to join your efforts with Maurice and improve the caliper instead of getting the thousand and first new measurement tool. I am pretty sure Maurice would support it. From a user standpoint it is hard to cope with which tool is the most improved one...

BR
HoWil

[Zolko]

• If I select "Measure Distance" and select a point than "Button" for "First Element" gets disabled and the one for the "Second Element" gets selected. If I accidentally select a wrong first point, than it is not possible to simply select 'First Element' again or e.g. press Esc. "Reset" clears all my measurements I have done before... thats not an solution.

yes, I noticed that too. Needs to be fixed.

• Nice to see that this tool is further improved... but wouldn't it be better to join your efforts with Maurice and improve the caliper instead of getting the thousand and first new measurement tool. I am pretty sure Maurice would support it

I tried but he didn't want. Then I proposed this for GSoC but it was not chosen. So I did it myself, I need this tool: that's the very principle of open-source, scratching an itch. This should actually be in core FreeCAD, not as an addon-module. But Part's measure tool only measures 2 shapes, you can't measure a circle's diameter, a segment's length, or a distance between snap-points.

[M4x]

I've just learned about the caliper tool

Could you tell us more about the differences?

[GeneFC]

It looks quite useful. Thanks!

One small thing I noticed was that the measurement result seems to be attached to an end of the shape. When I enlarged an object to better select the correct points the measurement result was often outside the viewing area instead of where I clicked.

Not really a big deal, but ...

Gene

[Zolko]

• If I select "Measure Distance" and select a point than "Button" for "First Element" gets disabled and the one for the "Second Element" gets selected. If I accidentally select a wrong first point, than it is not possible to simply select 'First Element' again or e.g. press Esc.

I've updated the workbench, this is improved now (by unchecking the first selection button). Could you please test and report whether the behaviour is correct now ?

[Zolko]

I realized the tool creates an App::AnnotationLabel and a Part::Feature for every dimension entity to be displayed. A question out of curiosity to understand how you thought about it: wouldn't it be better to use a tracker that only rely on coin rather than an object that have a Part Shape?

may-be ... probably, but I don't know what a "tracker" is. Actually, I'm quite certain that it could be made much better. If you had some time to look at the code and propose some improvements would be great.

[carlopav]

may-be ... probably, but I don't know what a "tracker" is. Actually, I'm quite certain that it could be made much better. If you had some time to look at the code and propose some improvements would be great.

Sorry, I meant a coin (pivy) object, that does not have a shape but just a visual representation (you do not probably even need a document object). I wrote "trackers" cause Draft provide a smal library for them and they are called like this. Anyway it's nothing really important, since everything is deleted after usage.
I used the tool also today at work and i find it really easy to use.