ben wrote: > > Till Harbaum / Lists wrote: > > I wondering if i am doing a useless job since someone else already > > did this or there's some other editor i am missing. Do you know of > > something as simple as xfig being able to write gcode? Do you think > > such an xfig patcg would be a useful contribution? > > I think this would be very useful. I am quite sure I would use it > personally. I agree that xfig is a bit odd: it takes longer to get used > to than some other programs. Its not as slick as, for example, inkscape. > But I think its better for certain things, and its the first program I > turn to when I need to make a mechanical drawing.
wow. when someone brings up a tool as arcane (these days!) as xfig, i have to come out of lurking mode. i suspect i described this to the list at the time, but it was a couple of years ago that i was doing it: are you aware of the program "hp2xx"? (http://directory.fsf.org/hp2xx.html) hp2xx will translate hpgl (plotter language) into many things, including gcode .nc files. the reason this is good is that xfig can save in hpgl format. (it may call it ibmgl -- they're the same thing.) i've had quite good success using this combination for simple bas-relief carvings, using a single cutting head and depth. i'm sure you could come up with extensions, or conventions, to do more complex operations. the simple skeleton-cartoony head on the right in this picture came from an xfig original: http://www.foxharp.boston.ma.us/photos/mill/pic_5.html i did some other things you might find interesting -- the "merry christmas" angel in the center of that picture was originally hand-drawn by my wife. we don't have a scanner, so i took a picture of it with our digital camera. i ran the result through some image processing program (probably "xv", but it could have been anything) to increase the contrast greatly, making it look as much like a simple pen and ink drawing as possible. then magic happened: i ran it through a program called "autotrace" which is capable of calculating the centerlines of a bitmap image, and will turn it into vector graphics. i was thrilled when i found autotrace: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net so, running this: autotrace -centerline -output-format fig turned our angel into an xfig compatible rendition. after some minor manual editing to remove gaps, and fix other small botches, i was able to run it through hp2xx to create a carveable image. there was one more step, though -- the segment ordering made my image take a _really_ long time to carve. long enough that i invested many hours writing a simple gcode path optimizer to speed it up. i forget the exact numbers, but i think carving went from a large fraction of an hour down to 5 minutes or so. the path optimizer is here, if anyone's interested: ftp://ftp.foxharp.boston.ma.us/pub/pgf/cnc/ (i have a feeling there was one more step, which reduced multiple contiguous segments to a single segment. this may have been done while the image was still in fig format -- but now i can't remember.) paul =--------------------- paul fox, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (arlington, ma, where it's 53.8 degrees) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
