• Are you looking for a coupon code to buy my software? You can get one from lots of 3rd party sites but they won't work. My software never goes on sale and has never been discounted. The only coupon codes that are given is when I give a club presentation and I offer a discount to the attendees. Other than that, everyone pays the same price.

12 - Pricing and Quotes module for Segment PRO

Lloyd Johnson

Administrator
Staff member
This tutorial shows you how to use the Pricing and Quotation module in Segment PRO. This module, still under development, is a way for you to look at any bowl in terms of effort to build and then applies a value to various elements of the build. You can change the defaults for these actions or modify them at run time.

 
Hi Lloyd,
I've been playing around with the pricing and have a question and a thought.

Question is under setting there are two items quotations setup and pricing setup, they don't seem to really do anything. I'm assuming they are there for some future schema that you have in mind? Or am I missing something?

My though is, if I'm going to price out a bowl, I'm probably going to charge more for a 60 segment ring than say a 12 segment or even a 24 segment ring. So may be there should be someway in the pricing to consider the segment count per ring, like 12, 18, 24, 48, 60, 96, 144. Or may be some more in between the higher counts.
 
The pricing needs more work, obviously, but I thought I'd wait until I could get some feedback before spending more time on it. Mostly, I need to see if it is worth doing at all. I'm afraid that there isn't a model that works well for most people, let alone everyone and if that's the case, it maybe should just go away and I may revisit it at a later date.
I'm a little reluctant to put too much intelligence in for this reason and think it might be better to just let the user adjust the amount per painted segment (for example) for the current project because only then do they know exactly how difficult the current project is and how much an action is worth.
 
Lloyd I fine with that I know you were looking for some feedback and that is what I was offering
 
I am using your Segmentated Pro program. It works well until I save the project, at which time it seems to stop the whole thing. It saves to the directory, but can't find the PDF. I get an error message. What am I doing wrong? Thanks!
 
First what are you trying to save. The project or the quote for the project.

The quote for the project is saved as a PDF in Documents > My Segment PRO > Price Quotes, using the name you supply.

The project file is saved under c:\users\"Your User Name"\AppData\Roaming\Woodturner PRO\Segment PRO\Images\JasonPlan
Everything from AppData are hidden directories so to see them you have to change system properties to see them.

What is your error message?
 
I have seen this error once before and it was because the software was not able to write to the folder due to permissions issues. I'm not saying this is the cause, but it is something we can look at.

If you could email me your phone number, I'd like to do screen sharing with you to see what is going on.

Just so you know, the Pricing module is a work in progress as I'm wanting to get more feedback before spending a lot of time on it. I am ready to get back to it, though.

Please email your phone number to me at lloyd@woodturnerpro.com.
 
Hi Lloyd

Boy o Boy with all the things you are doing for your programs and this site I do not know how you find time to eat or sleep.

I do have a question on the pricing and Quote is can prices for wood be increased when wood prices go up? Also is there a place to insert Sales Tax when we sell it also? I had two more and forgot them so I will ask them tomorrow when I write them down.
 
Lloyd is the best to answer your question. Seems the material upcharge field could be used to accommodate wood price increases.
 
Hi Lloyd

Boy o Boy with all the things you are doing for your programs and this site I do not know how you find time to eat or sleep.

I do have a question on the pricing and Quote is can prices for wood be increased when wood prices go up? Also is there a place to insert Sales Tax when we sell it also? I had two more and forgot them so I will ask them tomorrow when I write them down.
Arlin,
There is currently a bug in the price quote system that I’m trying to get some time to work on it more. You can go to The Settings Menu > Price Quotes and change the prices. The problem is with persistence and it isn’t maintaining the price correctly.

The price quote system was more of an experiment to see what interest there is in a solution like this. I’m not convinced it is with the effort, though, especially since my programming time is so limited. It might make the software better by removing it altogether so that my efforts are more directed to the features that are needed by everybody , not just the 2% that would actually use it.
 
No problem my friend. It is just me learning more of the software and seeing how everything works. :)
 
Lloyd:
I agree with you that the price quote system is a unique feature. I personally have not ever used it. I for one would rather see your efforts in features that help in the development of the vessel. I find myself using both SP and WTP. SP does make the development of a pattern a breeze.
 
Arlin,
There is currently a bug in the price quote system that I’m trying to get some time to work on it more. You can go to The Settings Menu > Price Quotes and change the prices. The problem is with persistence and it isn’t maintaining the price correctly.

The price quote system was more of an experiment to see what interest there is in a solution like this. I’m not convinced it is with the effort, though, especially since my programming time is so limited. It might make the software better by removing it altogether so that my efforts are more directed to the features that are needed by everybody , not just the 2% that would actually use it.
Lloyd,
I know this is an old thread, but I'm curious as to whether or not you continued working on it or if you let it pass due to more important work. I was looking at the price for a bowl I designed and it was pretty close minus tax. Is there a way to adjust pricing for different woods and tax by state?
 
Lloyd,
I know this is an old thread, but I'm curious as to whether or not you continued working on it or if you let it pass due to more important work. I was looking at the price for a bowl I designed and it was pretty close minus tax. Is there a way to adjust pricing for different woods and tax by state?
As much as I like the concept of the pricing and quote system, it almost never gets used and so I am not currently working on it as there are a lot of things that are used universally which need attention. I am not saying that I am going to remove it because I use it myself, but I wouldn’t consider allowing the price to be adjusted by the cost of species as that would require a LOT of work and I simply don’t have the desire to do that much programming now that I’ve retired and am enjoying not spending so much time behind my computer. :->

Lloyd
 
Hello Lloyd, i have a few questions about segment pro. I use it for all designs now, i'm a segmenter.
When i start SP i see the version 1.1.029 but i can't see how to upgrade to newer versions?
Second question: When i design a vase or bowl with more then about 19,000 segments the program stops, "not enough memory" My pc runs on windows 7 ultimate and has 32 Gb memory. Did i miss how to install and use the software properly?

Peter
 
The current version of SP is the one you have. 1.1.029.

imo, if SP opens and runs ok for smaller projects, the issue may be with you PC.
Have you tried shutting down your PC and restarting? Other programs in the background may be limiting the amount of memory available.
 
When i shut down all programs and start SP there is no difference. When i design a vase/bowl lets say 5mm row, 24 segments, 80 rows i have no problems at all. When i start increasing the number of segments per row the program gets slower and slower. choosing another palette takes 5-10 seconds to change. At about 72 segments it takes longer and longer to see changes. Above 18,400 pieces SP shuts down.

Peter
 
Hi Peter
My desktop pc is an older windows 10 with a I3 processor and 4 GB of Ram
I just did a test in SP
I built a vessel with 136 segments per row, 0.125 row thickness and 144 rows for 19,584 pieces.
The program did not crash.

I first built the vessel to 17 " tall. Then I increased the height by 0.25". It took a few seconds for the SP to recalculate.
SP did crash on me once in this test but that was when I was trying to make changes before it was thinking. (going from bowl view to summary and back to bowl view). When I was patient. The program did its thing without crashing.

My guess is now you are somehow hitting the limit of your pc.
 
Peter,

I think you are running out of graphics memory.

When I render a bowl of 19,000 (or whatever) segments, I have to render each one of them in 3D space, painted on six surfaces in the correct order so that the proper species image shows with the correct orientation.. The graphics card has to render all of these surfaces whether they are visible or not and everything is kept in volatile memory. All of this has to be done in as little time as possible.

To accomplish this, I had to come up with an indexing scheme that greatly speeds up the process and to my great surprise, it works surprisingly well. I designed it to handle 10,000 segments, though, and that indexing code took me a couple months to finish. When I finished, I was my current 5' 4-1/2" height where I used to be a 6' 4" hunk. I'm shocked as hell that it works for nearly 20,000 segments.

The code is so complicated, though, that I won't touch it anymore because I can no longer figure out how the code works. So I feel your pain, but I'm not convinced it is the software that is causing the problem because 32 GB should make that a non-issue. The pain I feel doesn't hurt enough to make me want to jump into the fire pit again since there are a lot of golf courses in the country calling my name.

If you really want to make a bowl with more than 20,000 segments, you should consider using Woodturner PRO. With 32GB of memory, you can triple that number easily. It's just going to take you a long time to paint it and computer or video memory will not be an issue.

:->
Lloyd
 
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