The Partomatic philosophy behind Fender-Bender

Build123d is a powerful library, but it leaves the creation of final parts up to the developer. For a project like fender-bender, with many related and interlocking parts, this can make releasing a new version a project in and of itself.

Partomatic is an attempt to standardize some of the build automation behind each part. Partomatic is an abstract base class for components within a larger project. It defines a series of abstract methods which must be defined within a descendent class. These elements are:

load_config

load_config(self, configuration: str):

This method handles loading the configuration. In some cases this is loading a full BenderConfig configuration file by passing the file location; in other cases we simply pass along a valid yaml configuration of a component.

compile

def compile(self):

This method is responsible for generating the 3d geometry for each component.

display

def display(self):

Shows the relevant parts in OCP CAD Viewer

export_stls

def export_stls(self):

This method is responsible for generating and saving the actual STL files that will be a part of the release.

render_2d

def render_2d(self):

This method is responsible for generating any images that may be required for documentation or other publications. In many cases, this is implemented with a simple pass

partomate

def partomate(self, bypass_2d_render: bool = True):

This method is not an abstract baseclass and could be modified as needed. This method calls the - compile - render_2d (if bypass_2d_render is set to false) - export_stls

methods in that order.