NXT parts

[Louis Fleming]

I first worked with Ldraw several years ago and I am now in a new computer lab and trying to configure Ldraw for my students. In the past, I downloaded a parts packet for NXT parts and copied it into the Ldraw folder. Ldraw is now installed and I am trying to get teh NXT parts to show up for my students. I copied the nxt files into the parts folders and had Ldraw scan for the parts. I found the NXT sensors - but have not found anything else. Is there something I am missing or is it the NXT parts are just scattered and require some searching.

I would love to simplify the search for my students and remove the parts lists not needed but have no idea which lists my students will not need. We have the 9797 educational sets, the NXT supplement packs and the RCX educational set.

How can I remove the trains and other unwanted lists and is there a way to make finding the nxt parts simpler for my students in their first use of Ldraw?

Thanks
Louis

[Steffen]

These are 3 questions in one, as I understand.
Question 1 is: how to organize a mix between unofficial and official parts
Question 2 is: how to get NXT parts,
Question 3 is: how to ease/simplify access to the parts list.

To question 1:
In the past there was some lack of support from the tools for other folders aside PARTS, P and MODELS.
This led to the effect that people mixed their unofficial parts into there, and later never were able to sort them out again.
This fortunately has changed. Nowadays the suggested best practice is using

Code:

...\P
...\Parts

for official files, and, next to them,

Code:

...\Unofficial\P
...\Unofficial\Parts

for the unofficial ones. Read more here maybe: http://www.holly-wood.it/mlcad/customizing-en.html

To question 2:
The NXT parts took a long time on our parts tracker for getting their state from unofficial to official.
This was quite unfortunate because it over a long time led to the effect that people had to first install
the official parts and then download the (unofficial) NXT parts separately (probably from Philo's site) and add them manually.
In the meantime, these parts have become official fortunately, so that they should simply be part of the
latest official parts release (download and install complete.zip).

To question 3:
I suggest to not delete parts from your harddisk. You never know if or when some builder will need them again.
It would be helpful if you could post here which tool you're using for building.
If you're using MLCad, then you can setup its parts tree just as you like. For example, you could even
sort your NXT parts into groups, and all other parts, e.g. Train parts into others. Doing this is quite simple:
just start MLCad, then go to menu "Settings/Parts Tree/Tree Configuration". There, you can set up the groups
of the MLCad view, into which the parts will get sorted. Your setup you do there will be stored in a file MLCad.grp
in the MLCad program folder. The syntax to setup the tree is a little awkward and does not follow
any standard mechanism like e.g. regular expressions etc. Here's a quick, brief summary:
You can use "|" to "or" things. Thus,
Duplo | Primo
will match all parts which have "Duplo" or "Primo" anywhere in their title. If you want these words to be the first
ones in the title, you have to add a "<", thus
<Duplo | <Primo
will match all parts which have "Duplo" or "Primo" as first words in their title.
Similar, the operator "&" works as "and", and "!" works as "not", so
<_ & !<_Figure
will match all parts which have a title which starts with an underscore, but not with "_Figure".
Unfortunately, I do not know of any parenthesing mechanism so I cannot explain if saying something like
"a or (b and not c)" is possible.



For convenience, I have posted my MLCad groups setup at
http://forums.ldraw.org/showthread.php?t...87#pid6387
, so you can maybe download that as a start, and then customize/extend it to better fit your NXT needs.