Another V4 Release
I just uploaded another V4 release. This one has a couple of feature updates, including arc fitting for pencil paths, but the big thing is the increase in accuracy. There are a number of things that I tweaked internally to achieve this. I have been wanting to do this for a while and the arc fitting turns out to be a good reason. In general, if you used .0001” before, you can increase this by a factor of five in this release or .0005”. My goal is that most users will never have to go below .001” unless they...
read moreNew Build with Arc Fitting
I’m uploading a new build with (hopefully) improved arc fitting right now. I’ve redone the arc fitting about 5 different ways from the last build and I think I finally have something that I can call an improvement. To get the quality where I wanted it to be I had to crank up the internal toolpath quality in this build. You will find that toolpaths take longer in this build but you can safely back off the tolerance and still get results that are equal or better than previous releases. This build also has the...
read moreMore Arc Fitting Work
It’s been quiet here for a little while but work has quietly been progressing on the arc fitting code. I got feedback from a number of users who demonstrated cases where my code failed to produce good results. I would call my first release of the code a “one-pass” arc fitter. My new code is taking the output from that code and trying several optimizations on the toolpath to make it as smooth as possible. I ran my first real toolpath today using the code and it seemed to run really well. The mill seemed...
read moreVersion 4 Upgrade Policy
The version posted yesterday is likely to be the last before the “official” first release of V4 in about a week. That current version has a 60 day timeout and no limitation on registration codes. Please try it out and give me any feedback you can. In an email about a month ago I said that any license purchased after 1/1/10 would be valid for V4, licenses prior to that would require an upgrade. Sometime after that email I realized that I told a bunch of people that there would be a minimum of 1 year of updates. In...
read moreBuild 23 with Arc Fitting
I uploaded the latest release to http://www.grzsoftware.com/v2dl.php . It features both the arc fitting and the multicore waterline code. I need to warn everyone that the UI for arc fitting will change- I’ve given you too much power right now (just kidding, it is too complicated for the newbies though). It will likely change to a single drop down like- Arc Fitting: None, Low, Medium, High where Low, Medium, and High cause the arc fit tolerance to be some predefined multiple of the global tolerance. From what...
read moreMulticore Waterline Finishing
The image below says it all: This was taken on a MacBook with the Intel i7 4-core chip in it. There are actually just 2 “real” cores and both support hyper threading for a total of 4. As you can see, the new waterline code seems to keep all of them nearly full. The “offsetting” stage is responsible for the blip at the start where all cores are 100% used. I am not yet sure why the waterline cannot get similar utilization but I think that I’ll enjoy this for a while before digging into it any...
read moreArc Fitting Update
As usually happens, the arc fitting ended up being more tricky than I initially figured. It turns out that finding an arc is easy, finding a “good” arc is hard. Right now the code is working well enough for me to call it a good first release. To get to this point I had to throw a lot more math at the problem so it slowed down more than I wanted. Coincidentally, I just got a new quad core laptop and I’m looking at only one active core during that arc fitting- definitely not good. Since my...
read moreArc Fitting in MeshCAM Version 4
One more feature I’ve been compelled to add for version 4- arc fitting on waterline paths. This has been a request for a while and it never seemed to be that important from a competitive point-of-view or in terms of the reward given the development effort. A couple of things happened in the past month to change this. First, I’ve been machining a lot of Renshape lately with medium-sized bits. This combination lets you really rip through the material- you’re likely to be limited by your machine instead of...
read moreV4 Build 19
I am in the process of uploading a new V4 build to fix a problem that I’ve seen before but I didn’t know exactly how to replicate until today. There was a bug where the waterline path linker could run the tool into uncut stock if the “Machine Geometry +” was used with the right type of model. It’s tough to describe so I’ll post some pictures below: This one shows where the bad links are: This is the 3D view of the same path. You have to imagine that the stock is not machined between the spokes because the...
read moreV4 Build 15
I just uploaded V4 Build 15 to http://www.grzsoftware.com/v2dl.php . It includes a few fixes for bugs found by Gerry and some optimizations that I made internally to save memory and speed up processing. This fix seems to be significant for the “Linking” part of the toolpath calculations and when you save a toolpath. I hope to find a few more big wins like this in the next few weeks.
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