Hi all,
I think a number of you have heard me go on about GitBuilding. A hardware documentation tool that is being developed by me, @kaspar, and @rbowman. We are getting close to our next release. Like all Open projects we have scratched a number of our own itches. For example you can now drag in a GLB model with an animation of parts in exploded views, and auto preview YouTube or PDF:
and
While I am very happy with some of these things. The project still has some major flaws which I am not correctly skilled to solve:
- It is pretty hard to install (especially on Windows) if you are not used to Python
- The look and feel of the documentation is a little ugly and clunky
If anyone with Python packaging skills, or web dev skills is looking for a something to do we would be really interested in talking to you.
It might be fun to do a GitBuilding tech demo, and QA/feedback session in an informal call? I know @ryanfobel has been playing with it, would be great to get feedback from more people.
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Hey @julianstirling, I’m currently running gitbuilding on Windows using WSL which is fairly straightforward. I haven’t personally found a need for a Windows install, but I do have experience with python packaging for Windows (mostly using conda) and would be happy to contribute.
The Youtube/pdf previews look really nice! Do you have any references for how to make those exploded view animations?
+1 to a demo/feedback/informal call.
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I generally stay away from conda. But if it is a way to make a .exe for windows then I am all ears!
The exploded animation is any GBL file with a single animation. It will run the position from linearly from the start to the end of the animation (ignoring the rotation changes). You can make the animation in Blender.
I’ll try and document some of these when we release it. Currently I am doing a big tidy up of how we handle paths. I was doing everything with os.path but this made urls go funny in windows, and my ad-hoc fixes for this finally started falling over!
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