August 16th, 2013 @ 15:47

Kliment, of Printrun/Sprinter/4pi/… fame, has struck again. Sponsored by Joaz (jglauche@#reprap, who runs RepRapSource), he developed simarrange, a smart STL plater. Basically, you throw it a bunch of STL files or a directory with STL files, and it’ll attempt to fit them into plates of the given size (200x200mm by default, circular plates are also supported).
The algorithmic bits behind this are basically a greedy search, where the software tries to fit the items from biggest to smallest, and attempts to place each item closer to the bottom left corner first (or closer to the center) in any possible rotation. The spatial & angular rotation search granularity can be easily controlled using command line parameters. To decide whether an object can be placed at a given position or not, the object geometry is projected onto the 2D plate surface and bitmap-based logical tests are used to detect overlap.
This methods seems to produce tightly packed plates, as can be seen on these examples (the software outputs both the plate STL and these small visualizations):

plate24 plate19 plate07
plate22 plate18

Example plates produced by simarrange

I quickly jumped in to hack a few speedups, namely to avoid trying to fit objects which we already failed to fit on the current plate (in the case of making copies) and to detect if it is possible to make copies of each produced plate (which can save a lot of time if you’re plating dozens of printer kits for instance), and I contributed part of the code to make centered packing work. Kliment then added multicore parallelism yesterday (using OpenMP for full cross-platform support) to search over rotations in parallel. With all these optimizations, plating jobs which would have initially taken entire days now run in less than 10 minutes :)

Oh, and it’s already integrated to Printrun’s plater :)

Pronterface's integration of simarrange

Pronterface’s integration of simarrange

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