Woodpecker Plug-in for Grasshopper

Hello everybody,

I want to introduce something that we have been working on for a little while now: Woodpecker, the BTL export plug-in for Grasshopper.

BTL (Building Transfer Language) is a free standard for timber fabrication that offers a wide range of timber processings, including 5-axis contours. It is notably not machine-specific, can be read by LignoCam and other CAM softwares and is usually created by timber-specific CAD softwares such as cadwork or SEMA. BTL is being maintained by design2machine: design2machine.com/btl/

Woodpecker is a plug-in for Grasshopper that offers a number of components that can turn input geometry into fabrication data in BTL format, thereby enabling users to extend their parametric models seamlessly into fabrication. It is being developed by designtoproduction for LignoCam.

At the moment, we are still in a pre-alpha phase, but we already want to show you some example videos of the workflow - see our brand-new youtube channel: www.youtube.com/user/designtoproduction

Woodpecker will be made available for free on food4rhino.com.

- Hanno

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by djordje on June 18, 2013 at 12:33pm

Nice.
Thank you.

Permalink Reply by Jony Reponen on June 24, 2013 at 1:35pm

Interesting.

Permalink Reply by Anton Bakker on June 25, 2013 at 7:38pm

Hanno, could I use this to get the segments out of a loft? Here a screenshot of the loft: Would love to fabricate the segments.

Thanks,

Anton

Permalink Reply by Hanno Stehling on June 26, 2013 at 2:03am

You are lofting between the cross section curves, right?

Sure you could use Woodpecker to generate fabrication data for this. There is a "contour" operation that uses a top and a bottom curve and basically generates a ruled surface between them to be milled. So in this case you could simply create four curves along the corners of your cross sections. Probably the planar sides of your arch don't have to be milled anyway, so you would end up with one contour operation for the inner face and one for the outer face.

Hanno

Permalink Reply by Stefan Tschaikner on September 11, 2013 at 5:41am

Very intressting work!

any idea when woodpecker is ready for use?

Permalink Reply by Hanno Stehling on September 12, 2013 at 2:04am

We plan on releasing Woodpecker either in time for the Holzbauforum in Garmisch (Dec 2013) or for Fabricate in Zurich (Feb 2014).

Permalink Reply by Stefan Tschaikner on September 12, 2013 at 6:16am

ahh thanks for reply, looking forward to try your tool

Permalink Reply by Hanno Stehling on November 13, 2013 at 7:52am

Woodpecker has been released!

We just uploaded version 1.0 to Food4Rhino: www.food4rhino.com/project/woodpecker

Permalink Reply by Toni Österlund on May 14, 2016 at 12:50pm

Hi Hanno,

has there been any new development with the plugin?

I'm in need of a solution for applying marking in BTL.

Example:

PROCESSKEY: 4-060-3 Marking/Labeling
PROCESSPARAMETERS: P01:00007953 P02:00000000 P04:00001640 P06:00000900 P07:00000000 P11:00000800 P12:00000000 P13:00000000 P15:""
PROCESSIDENT: 5

Is there currently a solution for adding custom Processkeys and Processparameters to the btl-file?

Permalink Reply by Hanno Stehling on May 17, 2016 at 1:28am

Hi Toni,

development has not been very active with the 1.0 version recently. However, there will be a new version coming, covering BTLx and other things! We are still in the planning process, and I will gladly add your suggestion of user-defined Processkeys/parameters to the list.

The new version won't be ready soon, so for now I'm afraid there is no solution for custom operations with Woodpecker.

Permalink Reply by Toni Österlund on May 24, 2016 at 11:58pm

Ok,

thanks a lot for the information Hanno!

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