Waterline Status
After the last posting it took about a hour to move the new waterline code from the test command in the photo into the main machining dialog. It worked pretty well until I started playing with the machining angle- I found the parallel and waterline were not consistent near the threshold angle. I’ve tried a number of approaches and am finally closing in on a good solution. My current approach may have more overlap between the regions but with fewer retracts and a much smoother finished part because I’m trying...
read moreNew Subdivision and Waterline
Randy sent me a photo of a toolpath showing a defect where the parallel finishing path would undercut when the path was almost but not quite right. I was able to fix it quickly but the fix led to a 25% increase in calculation time and I didn’t want to go backwards on that after all of the optimizing effort. I wrote a new subdivision method that eliminates the problem with a slight penalty in calculation time. After I spend time optimizing it I expect the get an overall speedup because it allows much more...
read moreBuild 6628
I just uploaded a private release at http://www.grzsoftware.com/files/MeshCAM2-6628.exe . It has the new and improved parallel finishing code that should be nearly done- unless bugs are found. I have not been able to duplicate the waterline bugs that were sent to me but there does seem to be a new bug that adds a bunch of retracts. I’m not too worried because the waterline and pencil finish will be rewritten soon anyway. I may do waterline before pencil because of this...
read more6512 Vs. Current Code
Below is a side by side of a toolpath using the Jeff Demand Reference Model. The total area of the shots is probably a couple of mm so the details you’re looking at are very small. Both are using the same tolerance value, .025mm or about .001″. Obviously, the paths are much better in the latest code. The main change is that I reduced the amount of point reduction in the toolpaths relative to the tolerance value so that the gains from the new toolpath code are not thrown away at the very end. For an...
read moreOptimization Goal Reached
Over the past few hours I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of what takes so long in the new code. Specifically, the Jeff D reference model has been enlightening as I’ve reviewed the reams of data generated during a toolpath calculation. Given the hugely dense model, it turned out that I needed a way to make many of the triangles go away if I wanted to speed it up. I was able to come up with a final optimization that removed a lot of triangles without reducing accuracy in any significant way ( I won’t...
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