Pocketing Update
April 25, 2007 · Filed Under MeshCAM Development
I’m just finishing up another week in Hong Kong and China so MeshCAM development has been a bit slow. The pocketing code is still underway but I needed to come up with a better way to input the outlines to test. DXF files are an obvious choice since I can generate them with any CAD program. I had written a 2D DXF reader in Python some time ago but since MeshCAM now includes Lua for scripting I thought it would be good to port it to Lua and continue testing with that. This has several benefits:
- Learn more Lua.
- Write infrastructure code to call specific Lua functions from C++. Currently, MeshCAM executes an Lua script in its entirety with the interpreter being setup and destroyed for each file that is executed. This new code can be used to add a lot of expandability to MeshCAM-for instance, I now think that all new input file types will be implemented in Lua.
- Have a working DXF reader to read 2D files. If I decide to let users load outlines and profiles to be cut I can use this code.
The code is about half-ported and I’m liking Lua more and more as I use it.