This question was a bit of a nerd-snipe for me, but after a bit of tinkering around I was able to generate a part file for the octagonal truss.
Here it is: 228-2500-1381.dat.zip (623.1 KB)
To get this into your LDraw Parts library:
- Unzip the file to get “228-2500-1381.dat”.
- Find the SnapCAD folder, mine was at
C:\Program Files (x86)\VEX Robotics\SnapCAD - Copy “228-2500-1381.dat” into the parts folder.
- Add the following line to the bottom of
Parts.lst
228-2500-1381.dat VEX IQ Octagonal Truss
- If SnapCAD was running while you did the above, quit and relaunch it.
Note that you’ll probably need administrator privileges on your machine for items 3 & 4.
After doing the above, the new part should appear in your library, at “Other Parts > V > VEX IQ Octagonal Truss”
In case anyone’s interested, here’s an overview of how I generated the part file:
Details
To generate the part file, I did roughly the following:
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Read up on the file format for LDraw parts, and concluded that converting from STL to LDraw .dat would probably be pretty easy. (LDraw is an open-source standard originally developed for LEGO CAD; SnapCAD is an LDraw editor with a library of VEX IQ parts included)
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Verified that a STEP file for that part was not available in the “Specialty Structure” .zip on this page.
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Downloaded the VIQC Rise Above field CAD from this page and opened it in Fusion 360 (but pretty much any CAD package would work fine for this).
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Found one of the octagonal trusses in the parts tree, right-clicked it, and exported as plaintext STL. (for anyone following along at home, be sure to save as “Plaintext” or “ASCII” STL rather than “binary” STL which is usually the default)
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Wrote a short python script to convert the plaintext STL to the LDraw part format, and ran it with
cat part.stl | python3 stl_to_ldraw.py > 228-2500-1381.dat -
Manually added some metadata to the top of the resulting .dat file (part name, author, keywords, etc.)
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Verified that the file worked in my own LDraw install using the procedure above.