Performance Improvements
Two users, Jeff and Robert, have sent me files that, for different reasons, cause MeshCAM lots of trouble. This has caused me to dig into MeshCAM with a performance profiler and see what can be done. So far I’ve found a few spots that gave immediate increases with only a line or two of code changed. I cannot imagine how these changes can cause large improvements in speed but they have. I’m seeing 10-15% better performance for the finishing code.
I’ve also been attacking memory usage which is a problem for these files. When I started MeshCAM five years ago the largest file users would enquire about was about 7 megs. At the time precision was more of a problem so I used double precision internally to represent the triangle data. Now the files are pushing 70 megs so I’ve had to go back to standard precision. This should not cause any accuracy degradation in the toolpath and is no longer needed by MeshCAM internally because my code has become robust enough to allow less precision and still work well. In the days of gigabytes of memory this optimization may not be a big deal but this was as good a time as any to address the issue since I’ve made vast changes internally in the last week. It will help on the edge cases and not hurt any normal case.
Robert,
Oh goodie, 150 meg stl files in the works
jeffD / rabid_ferret
That’s it, rabid_ferret–always stay one step ahead of the competition.
Robert, while you’re tweakifyin’ things Gordon over on the forum ran across what seems to be a pretty basic bug. In machining bitmaps, the waterline finishing honors a set angle limit, but the parallel finishing does not honor its angle limit. I never saw that because my bitmaps have been shallow enough to never require waterline.
Randy/happy_puppy
Is there a pdf manual about mesh cam?
something off line?
I’m trying to use AlibreCam the licensing is a killer. have to get approval to uninstall.
It’s very expensive.
Roger-
An HTML version of the manual can be found online at http://www.grzsoftware.com/manual . I can send you a PDF directly but it isn’t formatted for PDF so it doesn’t look very good. Let me kow if you prefer this.
-Robert
Robert, my latest STL was 107MB (391604 faces) and 3R4 handled it fine. Took a little over 20 minutes per side (double-side machining) to calculate rough and mixed parallel/waterline finishing at .0005″ tolerance. I was impressed!
Randy / happy_puppy
Randy-
That’s good to hear. Make note of the settings you used and see if the next release improves everything.
-Robert