DropCutter

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]. Read more »

Adaptive DropCutter step-forward

Submitted by lars on Fri, 11/05/2010 - 04:19
Adaptive DropCutter positioning compared with fixed steps

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 »

Syndicate content