Hi John,

Here's what wikipedia has to say about it:

"Because ASCII STL files can become very large, a binary version of
STL exists. A binary STL file has an 80 character header (which is
generally ignored - but which should never begin with 'solid' because
that will lead most software to assume that this is an ASCII STL
file)."

So assimp may be doing the right thing. But since in the real world
there are plenty of binary STL files floating around that also begin
with "solid", it may be worth supporting.

- Mrinal

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 5:37 PM, John Hsu <johnhsu@willowgarage.com> wrote:
> It does look like the first few characters of arm0.stl starts with "solid
> First_firstpiece", I guess somehow assimp is confused into thinking the mesh
> is an ascii stl instead of correctly seeing it as a binary stl?  Running it
> through ivcon removes those characters too, but ultimately, I think this
> deserves a ticket under robot_model:
> https://code.ros.org/trac/ros-pkg/ticket/4740
>
> thanks,
> John
> On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 3:11 PM, Mrinal Kalakrishnan <mail@mrinal.net>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Felix,
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Felix Messmer <felix_messmer@web.de>
>> wrote:
>> > Hi John,
>> >
>> > thanks for your reply!
>> > Our *.stl files are already in binary format.
>>
>> Make sure that your binary .stl files do not start with the word
>> "solid", because that would get interpreted as an ascii STL file,
>> according to the spec. I think the cturtle versions used to handle
>> this ok, but not the new versions. If this is the case, simply
>> overwriting the word "solid" with a hex editor into anything else
>> should fix the issue.
>>
>> Hope this helps,
>> Mrinal
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>
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