Roughing Update
I haven’t posted an update in a while so I thought it was about time. Long-time MeshCAM users may recognize the image below. It comes from my work a year or two ago to develop a good pocketing algorithm. At the time I was a little afraid of using it in production because pocket algorithms are notoriously difficult to get correct. After letting it stew in my head while working on my “more robust alternative” that I posted in the past few months I’ve come to believe that this code was probably pretty good. The “more robust alternative” suffered some limitations that could cause poor toolpaths if given data that contained the miniscule inaccuracies that floating point numbers can have. I figured that if I have to deal with that problem anyway I should use the “correct approach” that I had been pursuing before.
Unfortunately, the code I had completed only handled the polyline offset problem. This is the bulk of the problem but there’s still the code to sort and clean up the incoming contours and islands as well as linking the offsets. The cleanup code is done and seems to be stable. It also handles nested pockets and islands properly.
The image below shows the lining problem where the collapse of the vertices as the contour is offset can lead the code to not link the offsets with a minimum number of retracts (look at the red arrow. Yellow are island boundaries, purple are the pocket boundaries). This shouldn’t be a big problem, I just have to work through it.
The ultimate goal here is to eliminate the ZMap in the roughing and provide smoother toolpaths without that “toolpath quality” option that I have in there now.
