Display both metric and US?

I live in the US, but use metric for most wood working because I can’t stand doing math with US units. However, I do live here and many times I need to double check the size of something in inches for comparing to the “real world”. Could you please make the measuring tool display units in both metric and US? If there is room on the display, perhaps other places could show both units, like when I select a rectangle or circle and the size is shown.

Thanks,
Gary

Has the US invented a new measurement system?.. :yum: :smiling_face_with_tear:

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Please don’t clutter the interface! If management feels the need to accommodate this request, please make it an option.

PS: the “US units” is called the Imperial system and was originated by the Brits. Of course they’ve abandoned in favor of sanity.

No, they still have one foot in the grave… :face_exhaling:
When I was in elementary school I was promised we would be metric by the 80s. Then I became an engineer using metric but had to deal with the real world, too. I really wanted the changeover to happen, but it hasn’t yet. Now most things are secretly metrically measured. When I buy plywood, it comes in 6mm, 12mm, 18mm, etc. Although I still hear non-US youtubers talking about 2x4s. BTW: a 2x4 is actually 1.5 x 3.5.

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Absolutely! Perhaps a checkbox on the setup page would turn on “other units, too”.

And the US does not use “Imperial Units”. That’s what the UK used. The US uses “United States customary units” which has different sizes for pints, gallons, etc. from Imperial. Example: 1 US pint = 0.473176L, 1UK pint = 0.568261L The UK is not fully converted yet. Don’t try to sell ale by the half liter in a pub. The patrons will feel shortchanged. They want a full pint.

I blame Jimmy Carter. He should have just cut the cord & made it official. I still think in “English”, which is how I mostly see it labeled. Either that, or Inch/MM or Inch/Metric. But had we committed to Metric in the '80s, it would be second nature by now.

How about just moving/mirroring the Units toggle to the main menu?

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I don’t see us changing this one. Unit selection has been in the job setup for a while and that’s as good a place as any for it.

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I have used the units selection to switch between the two when I needed to match up the design against the real world, but I think I found a bug. I have started with MM, designed a bit, switched to inches to view the sizes in inches, then switched it back and it seems that the dimensions are different.

For example, I will make circles 9.000 mm in diameter, switch units and back and now the size is 9.001 mm. I don’t know if this is actually changing at that time or if the value was rounded poorly at the time I entered the value and I did not notice it then.

I have also noticed I will have X dimensions off by .001 mm but Y dimensions won’t be.

I have been meaning to come up with a reproducible example, but so far this error has been random and it has always been noticed after swapping units and back.

So I don’t like swapping units.

Rounding due to how computers handle floating point.

See:

https://bartaz.github.io/ieee754-visualization/

As a developer, that’s what I hated about Excel when it came out. The sum of a column of dollars and cents would often be wrong because $0.01 became a repeating binary. I came from a background of writing software with languages that supported fixed point. (I started during the computer cretaceous period).

In this case, you don’t need floating point. You could do fixed point with three digits. And that can be simulated with integer math by scaling everything during I/O. With 64bit signed math you could support a bed as wide as 9,223,372,036 kilometers with 0.001 mm precision.

Though I do appreciate when management says to use floating point because “just get it done”. I have been there.

Given they’re about the only ones who still use the Imperial system they might as well start calling it the US system :grin: (yes I know there are some exceptions, mostly looking at you UK, fix your road distance/speed signs)

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It always makes me happier than it should when I hear someone in the US choosing to use metric. I might be wrong but suspect when most imperial users think of metric they think of just distance and weights but all the other metric units are wonderful how they all neatly work together mostly without weird conversions.

Not getting this one. The object has already been created & exists in the database (memory at this point). The data is stored in metric, regardless of which units you use to create it. Displaying it in Inches & changing back actually changes the values in the database? It should just DISPLAY the metric dimension in inches ?!?!

Now, if the object had been created in inches, say 3/4" for example, I notice it stores it as 19.049999999999997. A floating point error of 0.000000000000003 on the conversion (smaller than an electron :wink: )
How could floating point error round that off to anything other than 19.05 for display?

Wow! If I create that 9mm circle in inches, typing “9mm” it stores it as 4.500879999…
If I change units to metric, it stores it as 4.5 ???
So the interface converts the “9mm” to inch, then converts it back to mm to store it??

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