Preferences

Preferences are application-wide options and settings that are persistent across different projects. Cell Editor’s preferences are split across 6 tabs:

General

The General tab includes options and settings that affect most of Cell Editors standard functions.

General:

  • Distance Unit: The unit to be used for all distance values in cell editor. By default, this is mm.

  • Angle Unit: The unit to be used for all angle values in cell editor. By default this is degrees.

  • Author name: The default author name to be applied to cells created in cell editor. In the form <name><email>.

  • Mesh format: The default format meshes are saved and exported as in cell editor.

  • Autosave every: If enabled, cell editor autosaves the current cell opened. The period of time in between autosaves is specified to the right of this option.

  • Automatically disable collisions between fixed links: If enabled, links connected by a fixed joint will have their collisions disabled.

Search Paths:

  • Verbotics Weld: The location of the Verbotics Weld application (weld.exe). Generally, this location will be C:/Program Files/Verbotics Weld (Development)/bin. If specified, the Open in Weld button located in the ribbon menu becomes functional.

  • Robot Presets: The directory to store downloaded and local presets in. By default, this will be in C:/Users/<user>/AppData/Roaming/Verbotics/Cell Editor/presets.

Robot Operating System

  • Catkin Workspaces: Directory containing catkin workspaces.

  • ROS Location: Directory containing ROS.

  • ROS Version: The version of ROS being used

Note

These options are in regard to using ROS Packages with Cell Editor. For more detail regarding this, see ROS Packages

  • Restore Defaults: Restores preferences to the default option/value for each setting.

preferences-menu-general

General Preferences

Viewport

The Viewport tab contains options for customising the viewport’s appearance:

  • Set background colour: Set the background colour as either the system default, or a manually selected colour.

  • Background type: Set the background to either be gradient, or a solid colour.

preferences-menu-viewport

Viewport Preferences

Updates

The Updates tab lists options relating to updating the Cell Editor Application:

  • Automatically check for updates: If enabled, the application will regular check a selected update channel for new updates. If an update is found, a dialog will alert the user on start-up.

Update Channel: The update channel to check on start-up. Cell editor currently has 2 update channels, these being Nightly and Beta.

Note

Nightly releases are created at the end of the day if changes have been made to Cell Editor. These releases are highly unstable and not recommended to use. However, these releases are guaranteed to have the latest features.

preferences-menu-viewport

Viewport Preferences

Keyboard Shortcuts

The Keyboard Shortcuts tab consists of a table of different tools and functions sorted into categories relating to their purpose.

Each row in this table contains a Name label, a Shortcut textbox and an button to Clear the shortcut.

Clicking in the shortcut textbox will trigger a recording mode, where the combination of keys you enter next will be recorded as the shortcut.

preferences-menu-shortcuts

Keyboard Shortcuts

Mesh Editor

The Mesh Editor tab covers options for linking a mesh editing application to cell editor, such as Blender. Cell Editor is configured to use Blender by default, as such if you have Blender installed, this feature should work without any adjustments to these settings.

If you are using a different application, or the location of Blender is not in your computers program files, linking an application will require the following:

  • Application: The directory containing the .exe. file for your mesh editing application.

  • Launch Arguments: Arguments to be passed to the mesh editing application when launched. There are several environment variables that can be used:

    • %APP% accesses the application executable.

    • %DIR% accesses the working directory.

    • %CE_DIR% accesses the cell editor directory.

  • Files to watch: The location of the file that cell editor should check for changes. Multiple file locations can be entered, where each location is separated by a semicolon (;).

  • Pre-launch command: The command that is run before the mesh editing application is launched.

  • Post-save command: The command that is executed when the filed opened by the mesh editor is saved.

Pre-launch and post-launch commands are often scripts used to convert the cell editor format of the mesh (by default a “.glb” and “.json” combination) to and from the format used by the editing software.

Note

When using launch arguments, mesh files to edit are placed under %DIR%/input.

Integrator

The Integrator tab contains settings for Cell Signing. Cell signing verifies that the cell was made by a qualified integrator or verbotics employee by assigning a private key.

The details required for cell signing are:

  • Private Key: The location of the private key file (.pem).

  • Passphrase: The passphrase for the private key.