Build 6856
I managed to track down several of the big bugs that were found by users in the last preview build. It’s still not any more complete than it was before but it should be a little more usable. 1) Fixed the no-finish-path bug. 2) Fixed the huge gcode file problem. 3) Fixed the Simple Toolpath command problems. You can download it here- http://www.grzsoftware.com/file/MeshCAM2-6856.exe...
read morePreview Build 6852
I managed to get everything pieced back together enough to release it as a preview. You can get it at http://www.grzsoftware.com/file/MeshCAM2-6852.exe . The finishing doesn’t have progress bars yet; that’s going to require a whole lot more code because of the new workflow and the multithreading. It does seem to work though and I’d appreciate the feedback. I’ll warn you now though, I made lots of changes so you are guaranteed to find bugs. Be sure to run everything through...
read moreBoundary Clipping
The last few shots I’ve posted show that the toolpaths have not been clipped by the stock boundaries. The shot below shows this problem fixed. The toolpaths are properly clipped by the machine boundaries even though the clipping created new islands in the lower part of the X and in the middle of the C shape. The code also correctly handled the clipping of the existing island in the O. This clipping task may seem simple when using a rectangle but the code is made to be very generic so that, at some point in...
read moreBetter Surface Angle Detection
Below is a couple of shots of the new surface angle code in the parallel finishing. The angle was set for 45 degrees and it seems much more consistent than the old code. It’s also much faster to compute. There are a lot of retracts but this seems to be somewhat common for this type of path when I’ve looked at the competition. I have two ways to fix this: 1) Use a more complete toolpath linking algorithm that will make additional checks for better linking options. 2) Compute a complete offset surface...
read moreFinishing Update
Below is a shot of the new changes to the finishing toolpaths. The paths are now projected down onto the geometry and properly subdivided . You can see how the supports are avoided and that a minimum amount of stock (and no air) is cut- a big improvement from before. I have the "Don’t Machine Top of Stock" working and I now need to make the threshold angle work properly. I’ve got some ideas about how to improve that while I’m updating the code. Until now I had been calculating the angle of...
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