Blogs

Replacement wheel for a trolley bag

Submitted by lars on Thu, 08/18/2011 - 13:48
Replacement wheel for a trolley bag

You surely know the useful commodity called trolley bag. They provide a convenient method of transporting your heavy personal things, especially if you need to walk a longer distance occacsionally.

But as with all the useful stuff, things tend to break sometimes. The usual weak points of trolley bags are probably their zippers and their wheels. These two types of failure usually turn the trolley bag into a worthless piece of junk, even if all other components continue to work well. But of course, home fabbing can save your day! Read more »

Plans for the upcoming release v0.6

Submitted by lars on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 13:43

PyCAM’s architectural rewrite is close to its completion. Around 50 plugins with limited scope replaced a formerly huge pile of fairly complex GUI code. Some few features were added and most of the existing features of release v0.5.1 are working. Read more »

Milling of a printed circuit board

Submitted by lars on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 20:04
Printed circuit board

We are currently working on our [Bad Link] (Mendel). Sadly the control board that we ordered (Generation 6) was broken. Somehow it turned mad whenever we tried to home the printer. Thus we decided to manufacture a control board on our own. We took the layout files of [Bad Link] and used [Bad Link] to turn the layout into GCode for a 0.7mm end mill. These preperations were quite easy, but the final step turned out to be rather time-consuming. Read more »

Base grid for model view

Submitted by lars on Fri, 08/12/2011 - 01:46
Base grid for model view

The current development version of PyCAM gained another visualization feature. An optional base grid puts your models into their proper dimension. This should make it easier to estimate the relative size of toolpaths, models and all other visual items.

A dimensioning scale (comparable to the one used in EMC2 Axis) is on the roadmap and will probably be part of the next release of PyCAM.

Configurable path patterns

Submitted by lars on Thu, 08/11/2011 - 00:10
Spiral path pattern

The migration of PyCAM to a new modular GUI structure is almost completed. Thus I recently started to add some new fancy features to exploit all the new possibilities. One quite visible feature is the new configurable path generator. It now allows you to select a spiral toolpath instead of the currently available grid pattern.

Expect some even more interesting features for the next release …

UPDATE: rounded corners and spiral direction (inside / outside) are now configurable, as well. Read more »

Laser zum Frühstück

Submitted by lars on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 14:25
Laser-Frühstück

Dieses Frühstücksbrettchen wurde mit einem Laser inhaltlich und optisch aufgewertet. Der Produktionsablauf ist recht unspektakulär und umfasst folgende Schritte:

  1. passendes Zitat auswählen

  2. Zitat mit Inkscape als Vektorgrafik vorbereiten

  3. Vektorgrafik in PyCAM einfügen und einen einschichtigen Gravur-Pfad erstellen

  4. die erstellte GCode-Datei in EMC2 laden und ausführen

Read more »

Development bits: modularization and improved visualization

Submitted by lars on Mon, 07/18/2011 - 03:39
Improved OpenGL visualization

Some PyCAM users are accustomed to running the current state of development (svn trunk) if they want to use the latest features or simply out of curiosity watching the progress. This was working very well for the last 18 months. Thus maybe they were surprised to see trunk in an unusable state for the last three weeks. Of course there is a good reason for this: a huge internal rewrite of the GUI is currently going on. This post will explain the goals of this rewrite and the current state of development. Additionally I will describe some recent visualization improvements. Read more »

Trace & engrave (Video tutorial)

Submitted by lars on Sun, 07/03/2011 - 01:06
Logo for video tutorials

The following video tutorial was created by Chris Reilly (he is a developer of the great [Bad Link] project). Chris shows how to cut a photo with [Bad Link], trace it with [Bad Link] and generate the engraving toolpath with [Bad Link]. The video is a good introduction of the workflow from a pixel image to GCode. Have fun with it! Read more »

PyCAM v0.5.1 released

Submitted by lars on Mon, 06/13/2011 - 21:22
Logo for release announcements

The new release of PyCAM contains one important new feature (extrusion of 2D models) and many small fixes and improvements. Windows users will enjoy a more modern look of the GUI theme and Linux users will be happy about a packaging with better integration into the desktop. Additionally the 3D preview performance improved drastically. This article will give you an overview of all important changes. Read more »

Improved visuals for Windows standalone executable

Submitted by lars on Sun, 06/12/2011 - 01:06
Improved theme for Windows standalone executable (XP)

The Windows standalone executable is a nice a simple way for Windows users to try out and use PyCAM. It offers almost all of PyCAM’s features (except for multi-core CPUs and distributed processing). But its user interface always looked a bit outdated, due to the missing Windows-stylish GTK theme.

This is now fixed – even though [Bad Link] currently [Bad Link] out of the box. But a few lines of code did it. Read more »

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