More Roughing Progress

I can say that the new roughing really is almost done now.  I managed to fix the bug I posted last time and in doing so I was able to delete about a hundred lines of code and make it more reliable- my favorite kind of bug fix.  The conformal roughing option is in the dialog and working now and the mill direction setting is working.  The progress bars are very fluid and interruptible which is always a challenge.  I have not assigned the various level of a roughing toolpath to different CPU cores yet so I can have everyone...

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More Updates

Work on the roughing has continued and new problems continue to popup.  Luckily, the bugs are only in the difficult code- not the very difficult offsetting code.  It turns out that I was getting bad contours like the ones below I thought the offsets were the problem so I wrote a bunch of code to begin a proper 3D engine rather than the simple graphics system I’ve had for a while.  I thought this would give me more options to visualize the massive amount of data generated internally by the offsetting code.  Turns out to...

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New Roughing 90% Done… Only 90% Left

The past few weeks have very productive and frustrating.  The new roughing now working well and the offset algorithm has been very robust.  Handling all of the special cases has taken most of the development time- every time I think I have it there’s a new special case the demands a partial rewrite.  I think that most of those cases have now been taken care of and I can move forward to try and get it into a releasable state. As of right now the roughing is functionally similar to what it was before but the resulting toolpaths...

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