Visualize tool moves to safety height

Submitted by lars on Sat, 11/13/2010 - 00:14
Tool moves to safety height

The latest release of PyCAM (v0.4) displays the cutting paths and the “safe” moves (at safety height) in a quite simplistic way. Basically the “safe” moves are visualized as direct connections between the previous and the next cutting move. Thus some users were confused by the “line” going through the material. It was not obvious that this move occours at safety height and thus will not touch the model.

The latest development code of PyCAM improves the visualization by adding the moves up to safety height and down to the next cutting location. Thus the visual result is now quite close to the view used by [Bad Link].

This has the additional advantage, that you will now immediately see the influence of the currently configured safety height. Changing this value in the Preferences dialog will cause a redraw of the toolpath with the adjusted safety height.

Additionally both the ODE and the triangle implementation of the DropCutter now behave in the same way when surfacing a model that is higher than the specified bounding box. The tool will now always move up to safety height wherever the model’s height exceeds the bounding box. Previously the triangle implementation returned a cut through the model instead of moving up to safety height.

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