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
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> >
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