Developers blog

Developer’s blog of PyCAM – a 3-axis CNC toolpath generator.

Welcome new developers!

Verfasst von lars am Mi, 01/25/2012 - 13:48
Development team symbol

Some days ago two more pairs of helping hands joined PyCAM’s development: Paul Bonser and John Wiggins from the ATX Hackerspace (hopefully I did not forget someone).

Quickly a lot of progress happened: Weiterlesen »

Reduced memory consumption

Verfasst von lars am Mo, 01/16/2012 - 04:05
PyCAM plugin: Memory Analyzer

PyCAM is – as the name implies – based on the scripting language Python. Python is a very efficient tool from the developer’s point of view: even complicated features can be implemented quickly and cleanly in a structured way. The downside of this ease of development can be a source of annoyance for users: number crunching applications are not as ressource efficient as their compiled counterparts. But today PyCAM gained a useful feature to fight its own ressource hunger. Weiterlesen »

Plans for the upcoming release v0.6

Verfasst von lars am Mi, 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. Weiterlesen »

Base grid for model view

Verfasst von lars am Fr, 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

Verfasst von lars am Do, 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. Weiterlesen »

Laser zum Frühstück

Verfasst von lars am Mo, 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

Weiterlesen »

Development bits: modularization and improved visualization

Verfasst von lars am Mo, 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. Weiterlesen »
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