Hi Alan, I can't tell you what the best practices are but I can tell you what the CAM software that I have used does. It will normally cut the entire path to a the specified width and depth leaving some material to be removed in the finish pass. A lot depends on what you are making, from your examples it looks to me like you would be better off to cut each path to a nearly finished depth and width and then go back and run a finish pass on each path to complete the work.
Your software looks interesting, I look forward to seeing some of your finished work. - John Guenther 'Ye Olde Pen Maker' Sterling, Virginia On Thu, 2009-04-16 at 19:19 +0100, alan battersby wrote: > Hello everyone, > I hope someone on this forum can offer some advice. I asked this > question on CNCZone Gcode programming but have not yet had a reply. > Perhaps I didnt word it clearly enough so can anyone on this forum help? > > I am in the process of building a cnc setup onto my wood lathe, to > hopefully cut patterns onto bowls see (http://imagebin.org/45774). I am using > emc > to control the steppers. At the same time as this I am developing > software to generate the gcode to cut the paths (see > http://imagebin.org/45775), there may be many paths > in a design. Paths probably will be wider than the milling tool used and > deeper than the maximum allowable cut per pass. Therefore I am placing > the code to cut a path inside a double loop. The outer loop will take > care of the width and the inner loop will take care of cutting to > depth. I suppose that I am cutting a long narrow pocket so cut full > width to common depth then deepen or the other way round? Is one way > better than the other so far as machining is concerned? > Expanding this question to many paths - Is it considered better practice > to cut all paths to the same common depth / width before looping to the > next depth / width value, or is it better to cut each path individually > to its finished width / depth before moving onto the next path. Or does > it not matter at all. > > You will gather from my questions that I have no experience in milling > (yet), this is a non-commercial retirement hobby project. I was an > engineering apprentice 40+ years ago and did some then, but have spent > the last 25+ years in computing. > > Hope that someone here will offer an opinion and I apologize in advance > if you think this post is off topic. > > Alan > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Stay on top of everything new and different, both inside and > around Java (TM) technology - register by April 22, and save > $200 on the JavaOne (SM) conference, June 2-5, 2009, San Francisco. > 300 plus technical and hands-on sessions. Register today. > Use priority code J9JMT32. http://p.sf.net/sfu/p > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stay on top of everything new and different, both inside and around Java (TM) technology - register by April 22, and save $200 on the JavaOne (SM) conference, June 2-5, 2009, San Francisco. 300 plus technical and hands-on sessions. Register today. Use priority code J9JMT32. http://p.sf.net/sfu/p _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
