Offset Roughing
As I started working on the new conformal roughing a bit more I realized that some fundamental changes would be required. Starting from a clean slate I wrote a new offset algorithm to base the roughing on. Long time readers may remember that I’ve had a spent some time working on other offset algorithms. My last one worked well but it wasn’t as fast as I’d like and it always had the potential to fail since it depended heavily on floating point math (even though it didn’t in my testing). My new code is much more robust and generates much smoother toolpaths than the old roughing even though the code is only half done. It’s still far from done but I think the proof-of-concept below shows enough promise to commit to this approach for V3.
Comments
2 Responses to “Offset Roughing”
Robert, how does this dovetail with your conformal roughing?
Your new offset roughing looks excellent, but seems to be cleaning at a single Z level. The conformal roughing looks to be more akin to parallel finishing.
Are these two strategies going to form a larger roughing concept–efficient cleaning at defined Z steps and then knocking off the jaggies?
Or am I seeing it wrong?
Inquiring minds need to know (or at least WANT to…)
Randy
Shouldn’t be too much different in terms of the conformal part- when the 2D path is created it will be projected down onto the model. The photo above doesn’t reflect that since I’m just working on the offset part now.
This new offset method would eventually eliminate the parallel roughing completely.