digitized elevation grid to STL code & Windoze.exe software released for free....

re: digitizing to an STL file

Hi guys:

Over the past year or two there have been calls on
how one gets an elevation file (a regular matrix of
elevations) gathered by an automatic CNC digitizer
program, into an STL (stereolithography) file.

Once into STL, programs such as VectorCAM, Millwizard
and Deskproto can generate the gcode to machine the
surface. Actually, VectorCAM can probably do the
whole job without this program......

About five years ago I wrote such a program (for Linux),
but it has been only today that I ported and compiled
it (32 bit console application) for Windoze (98B, 2000 etc).

But the trick is how to get the raw points into STL.

This program does that, and while it is probably just
for programmers for now (because you have to massage
the data in preparation for its transmogrification into
STL), perhaps the raw binary input format can serve as
an intermediate output format for the people who are
designing and building cnc digitizers.

----------------------------
Boring stuff for experts below:

This binary input file has six 4-byte values
at the start:

unsigned int xcnt: number of columns
unsigned int ycnt: number of rows
float xdelta: column increment
float ydelta: row increment
float zmin: minimum Z value in the entire file
float zmax: maximum Z value in the entire file

The rest of the file is (xcnt * ycnt) 4-byte floats
in row major order.

SO... thats what you'd normally write to, and then
in one step make your binary STL file by invoking

cnc_stl your_file.bin

and it would generate: your_file.bin.stl

Programmers please contact me for the pre-release
executables and source code in C. Later when it stabilizes,
I'll post version 1.0 to the files section,
a complimentary program to contribute to the cause!

Doug Fortune
http://www.cncKITS.com