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Auf arbofaktur.de bieten wir ein Raspberry Pi Gehäuse aus unserer Werkstatt an. Die Erstellung konnten wir komplett mit freier Software umsetzen: Design in OpenSCAD (in Debian und den freien Radeon-Treibern), Werkzeupfad-Generierung in PyCAM, verfahren wurde mit LinuxCNC. Read more »

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lars's blog

Cloning a toolpath for mass production

Submitted by lars on Wed, 03/23/2011 - 00:36

There are many ways to generate a toolpath for multiple identical work pieces. The simplest (and most time-consuming) approach would be to touch off the milling machine after each piece and run the same GCode again. Alternatively you can also generate the toolpath for one piece and then repeatedly shift the model to a different location and generate a new toolpath. PyCAM allows you to combine these multiple toolpaths in one GCode file, thus running all jobs in a row is already possible. A third approach would require you to clone the model at different locations and create one toolpath for all of these models. This requires more processing time, but you need to do this just once, anyway.

The new release of PyCAM (v0.5) gives you an even simpler option: just clone a generated toolpath and distribute the clones in a configurable grid of rows and columns. Read more »

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Cropping toolpaths to model outline

Submitted by lars on Thu, 01/13/2011 - 21:12

PyCAM currently supports only rectangular processing bounds. This can cause unnecessary machine moves in unused corners of this rectangle. Additionally it makes it harder to use support bridges, since they need to be connected with the remaining material outside of the bounding box. See the screenshot for an example of three objects that are supposed to be cutted out of a solid block.

The new toolpath cropping feature (currently only available in the development repository – to be released with v0.4.1) allows you to crop the toolpath to the required minimum. This can reduce machine time significantly. Read more »

New simulation mode (video tutorial)

Submitted by lars on Wed, 12/29/2010 - 05:23

The attached video demonstrates how to turn a 2D model (given as an SVG file) into a GCode toolpath.

Most importantly this video shows the new simple simulation mode. It is basically just a fast motion visualization of the toolpath progress over time. You can adjust the speed of the simulation. The visual result is quite similar to an EMC2 simulation. Just the path control mode (G61/G64) is ignored, thus you will not see potentionally rounded corners due to speed optimizations. Read more »

Engraving with single-line fonts

Submitted by lars on Sat, 11/20/2010 - 01:58

Engraving text is a nice additional feature for all kind of woodwork or processing of thermoplastics. It is always possible to just use regular True-Type fonts for this (e.g. by importing an SVG model file from [Bad Link]). But these outline fonts cause problems for small engravings, since the graver will probably remove too much material from of inside holes of the text. Thus the outline of the engraving will be ok, but the inner features of the fonts will be barely visible or they just look broken.

The upcoming release of PyCAM v0.4.1 will include support for single-line fonts (also known as stroke-based fonts) to overcome this shortcoming. Read more »

Configurable parallel und distributed processing settings

Submitted by lars on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 18:39

PyCAM v0.4 started to support parallel and distributed processing. This basically means that the calculation of toolpaths will use all available CPU cores of your machine automatically. Additionally you can also use some commandline arguments to connect to remote worker servers. This leverages your local CPU resources to process even huge models with the help of remote PyCAM servers in a timely manner. With the new upcoming release v0.4.1, PyCAM will also allow you to configure these network connections via the preferences dialog of the GUI. Read more »

Visualize tool moves to safety height

Submitted by lars on Sat, 11/13/2010 - 00:14

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]. Read more »

Visualizing the direction of toolpaths, lines and triangle normals

Submitted by lars on Fri, 11/12/2010 - 05:38

Until PyCAM v0.4 toolpaths were simply visualized with a line. This made it impossible to distinguish a climb milling style toolpath from a conventional one. The current trunk of the development code contains a small addition that let’s you enable hints for the direction. For the sake of simplicity they are implemented as simple OpenGL cones that are added in the middle of each line. Read more »

Adaptive DropCutter step-forward

Submitted by lars on Fri, 11/05/2010 - 04:19

The DropCutter strategy is probably the most simple algorithm for machining. It calculates the lowest possible position of the tool at various locations above the model. The path of the tool is usually split into parallel lines of movement. Since this strategy is simply based on sampling the surface of all cutter locations, the crucial parameter here is the “step-forward” – the distance between two points of calculation on one line. Read more »

Welcome paulusmax to the team!

Submitted by lars on Thu, 10/14/2010 - 16:29

I am glad to announce, that the sourceforge user paulusmax joins the development team of PyCAM. He plans to contribute code – which is obviously a great thing!

Welcome – and have fun!

PyCAM goes parallel!

Submitted by lars on Tue, 10/05/2010 - 05:21

As some of you may have noticed, PyCAM currently works with only one process – thus it does not use the full capabilities of modern multi-core CPUs.

Today I got tired of waiting many hours for a toolpath generation, thus I started to implement parallel processing based on Python’s [Bad Link] module. Read more »