Thanks a lot guys,

on a quick trial, changing the first word 'solid' into something else 
seems to work.
I will have a closer look at that on Monday and also ask the which 
converter was used to generate the files!
I'll get back to you.

Have a nice weekend,
Felix


On 2011-01-29 01:53, John Hsu wrote:
 > Mrinal,
 > Thank you for the info. I'll add a link to the ticket for records.
 > I wonder what converter the author from Fraunhofer used to export the stl
 > files :)
 > John
 >
 > On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 5:44 PM, Mrinal Kalakrishnan 
<mail@mrinal.net>wrote:
 >
 > > 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
 > > >> _______________________________________________
 > > >> ros-users mailing list
 > > >> ros-users@code.ros.org
 > > >> https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
 > > >
 > > >
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 > > >
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