Charon

This page is unfinished

Charon is an integration between Git and SolidWorks, designed by Henry Franks and Tim Clifford to eliminate the re-occuring problem of having >10 versions of a CAD assembly on the Google Drive (with only one person understanding it). It is named after the ferryman to Hell (for obvious reasons).

The GitHub repository can be found here. You are welcome to contribute.

It is assumed in this page that you understand Git and GitHub, please read that page first. Charon aims to keep the overall workflow as similar as possible to using Git for code, but with a new merge and diff driver to enable working with SolidWorks' binary file formats.

Features and Usage

A graphical difference shown by Charon (running on Hades)

Enhanced diffs

Without Charon, all git diff can tell you is that two files are different. With charon enabled, git diff will open SolidWorks to show you an interactive, graphical diff between the files, as shown in the screenshot.

Note that due to technical limitations caused by Solidworks, Charon cannot leave SolidWorks in this state, you will need to open the compare tool manually (under Tools -> Compare)

Usable mergetool

This output is not stable at the moment, it could change

Charon makes merging branches actually possible (but it will never be that easy...). A merge conflict will result in something like the following:

Disconnect_Puller.SLDPRT conflicts. Choose one of the following options:
  local:  take the local  file (what you are merging into)
  remote: take the remote file (what you are merging)
  edit:   open the files in SolidWorks to edit manually
  abort:  abort the merge resolution
Enter your choice:

Most of the options are fairly self explanatory, the interesting one is edit. It will open the files in exactly the same way as the diff tool, and you can view and/or edit them. After you exit solidworks, you will be returned to the menu. (Your edits to the files will be saved). You can then choose a file to take.

Installation

Configuring SolidWorks

You will also need to enable SOLIDWORKS Utilities at startup, you can do this by navigating (in SolidWorks) to Tools->Add-Ins and checking the box for startup next to SOLIDWORKS Utilities

Enabling Charon in a repository

To enable Charon in an existing repository, add it as a submodule and run the setup script:

git submodule add https://github.com/smh-my-head/charon
git submodule update --init
./charon/setup.sh

Cloning a repository that uses Charon

When cloning a repository that uses Charon, you will also need to need to run the setup script. Something like:

git clone https://github.com/cuspaceflight/repository-that-uses-charon
cd repository-that-uses-charon
git submodule update --init
./charon/setup.sh

Updating Charon

You may want to update Charon if improvements are made. To do this, update the submodule and then run the setup script again (each user will need to run the setup script):

git submodule update --remote
./charon/setup.sh