Array Tool - The Math Isn't What I Was Expecting (but it isn't the array function)

…it turns out to be (I know this will sound ridiculous) the limitation of dimensions to the 10,000th of an inch. :pleading_face: Don’t back hand me just yet… hear me out.

As I was prepping the intersecting lip for joinery by way of notching, I discovered why doing this in the past has been with challenging result. I will illustrate with an example:

If setting out to joint these two sides together with notches, first I take my material thickness into account: .23" and draw a box for that dimension:

Then I decide that I want 1" notches, so I duplicate the shape and divide its width by 16:

With the array tool, I now create my notch segments:

It works out fine:

Its when the base object isn’t an even number like the example with 16" of width. When working with a width such as this I divided it by 16 (and there lies the problem, the quotient from the first divisor as the result was .9786):

So the resulting array did the math as it should (.9786 * 16 = 15.6576). But that is now longer than my original.

I understand, the width and height appears to be capped at a resolution in the 10,000ths. And it seems rational and adequate. I always thought so. But this is at least one example where it can show itself. You know, maybe it won’t even make a difference. I’ll make the pieces and report back. I’ll probably have more of a challenge with my own laser kerf than 8/10,000 of an inch.

You know what never mind. Back hand away…

Yeah…

It came out just fine. :man_facepalming:

interesting effect and (still) nice result!
… another reason to switch to mm! :wink:

I didn’t do any of the rounding. The four places of rounding is applied by the application.

In fact, even when I tried to manually create / set the width of the initial array box, the value was automatically rounded for me.

After writing all of this I decided to post as I thought it would help others (as I ended up helping / realizing myself) understand that unless we are building a mile long (1.609344 km for @bernd.dk :wink:) wide or tall of a project, even a 10,000th of an inch (or even better 10,000th of a mm) is not going to be noticeable.

It was that amazing deep zoom level that caught me. But after writing the post and walking myself through it, I realized… I was nuts.

but, still interesting and amusing… :thinking: :laughing:

There could be a fairly elegant and simple solution to this, being able to set the total movement instead of the incremental movement. Maybe it’s relatively easy to implement as well.

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