EE Error Showing On BOM Table

[HaroldL]

I have been using a template for all my wood projects that have the EE set up with equations to calculate the board feet of the part. I don't recall who on the forum helped me set up the equations but this has been working well until now. I have one part that now has a problem formatting the result for the BOM table.

Here is a screen shot of the EE for the part with the problem:


And here is what the BOM looks like on the drawing:


So why is EE throwing this error and not rounding the BF value to two places like the rest of the parts? Is it because it is such a small part? The last two items certainly work, it's just that the rounding takes the BF to zero.

Does anyone have any ideas what is going on with this? Any help will be appreciated.

 

[DavidJ]

Just did a quick experiment. Remove the dived by 100 - the result then makes sense (gives 1). Add extra equation which takes that result and divides by 100, this time it works.

Not really clear why - as if you divide by 10 within the initial equation, all works OK. I don't have v24 installed anymore, so can't easily check for regression.

 

[HaroldL]

Thanks for looking into this David. I am certainly not a math wiz but something is strange with the EE. As I understood it, the equation BF was supposed to round BrdFt to 2-plcs. On a whim I increased the value of Width to see if a larger value would make BF round the value of BrdFt. What I found was that I had to get to over two inches before it worked as it originally was supposed to.

So why does a change in .005 make a difference and should Development take a look at this?

I like the changes made to the EE but it would have been nice to add a Rounding function, just sayin'.

Here are screen shots of my results:




So I made the changes you mentioned just to understand your results.
I removed the /100 and added another equation and that looks like it evaluated correctly. I don't recall this happening in v23 or v24 so I may just update my template to this format so I can avoid this kind of issue in the future.




Then I just changed to divide by 10 and got a result that is 10 times larger than it should, that is if I understand rounding.

 

[DavidJ]

Harold, I don't know why it behaves quite so oddly. I've already referred it upward for advice. I've noticed in the past that 'doing too much' in one equation can cause problems - but have never seen whether it works or not dependent upon the values before.

Surely 1/10 is 0.1 - not sure why you think it should be 0.01.

 

[HaroldL]

Surely 1/10 is 0.1 - not sure why you think it should be 0.01.

Ahh, I wasn't very clear , I meant that the result should be two places instead of one place for the BOM table. I think that's why the equation was set to /100.

I've already referred it upward for advice.

It will be interesting to hear what advice is given.

 

[DavidJ]

This is not a regression - it has been checked, exactly same behaviour in v24. More investigation being discussed.

 

[HaroldL]

This is not a regression - it has been checked, exactly same behaviour in v24. More investigation being discussed.

@DavidJ, I know this is an old post but I am wondering if this issue with the EE has been investigated any further. I'm working on some more small parts that need their EE tweaked in order to get a good read-out of the BF.