[step-manufacturing] Web Browser machine tool models

[Martin Hardwick]

All,

We have put some of the WebGL models that we have been developing for 
the National Simulation Service outside of our firewall.

There are demonstrations of the Impeller and Boxy and two machine tools 
that you can load into any Web Browser that has WebGL support (Firefox, 
Chrome, Safari and others).

The user interfaces are controlled by JavaScript programs running 
against XML generated from our STEP-NC data sets.

The JavaScript is easy to extend, for example, it should be easy to 
write a G-code generator for your favorite machine tool.

These are early demonstrations and there are many features that need to 
be added including making the machining programs run on the machine tool 
models, adding colors, annotations and tolerances, and enhancing 
performance by loading models on demand.

Therefore, if you do write some JavaScript programs please be aware that 
the underlying XML is subject to change.

In the long term we think programmers will want to use this data in 
their manufacturing applets so we should think about giving them code 
stability by formalizing the more popular XML patterns as "Presentation 
XML" standards.

You can find the demonstrations at the URL below or by going to our home 
page.

http://www.steptools.com/demos/

Martin Hardwick
Team Leader ISO STEP-Manufacturing

PS. Please forgive us if the data load time is slow. We have a partial 
T1 link into STEP Tools with no data mirroring at other sites.