Fighting with computers

A few weeks ago I mentioned a new Android app was available to assist during the assembly of projects made of blocks of stacked layers of material. That will not be complete with a similar app for those of you own Apple cellphones and iPad tablets.  For the moment the app is available for iOS 12 devices . Supporting older versions has not been a priority as we did not want development to lag behind but we might venture there if we get enough requests.  As with the Android app, this version is free too. A sample model is embedded so you can see how it works (go to the gear menu).

Collaboration with a local company paved the way to the development of an Android app to represent 3D models that are built by joining a set of 3D blocks. Each block is made of a set of layers of parts machined by a 3-axis CNC machine out of foam sheets.  The manufacturing process is more or less outlined in this video: The problem here was for work workers to have an easy way to know the assembly of the parts without the need of having a computer screen. Given each one of them happens to have a smartphone that seemed the obvious choice. And that is the result (portrait video warning): As you can see in the video each block has a red number hovering it. And the low polygon count of the 3D mesh is just to ease on the amount of data transmitted and not a limitation of the program itself. I wanted to make this tool  useful for other users, so the file format is a regular ZIP file with .mim extension that contains three different elements: one binary STL file for each block, f