HOW TO USE CAMWORKS WITH A STL CODE

This method only reconstructs a toolpath that follows the physical edge of the part, and doesn’t use any kind of tool radius offset. But for the real parts that I’d like to make it’s working. I still have a bug with the way splines are treated, hence why the spline hasn’t been reconstructed smoothly. dxf file, groups them into closed loops, then converts them into G-code.

HOW TO USE CAMWORKS WITH A STL CODE

My code reads arcs, lines, and splines from the. I modified this code to also read splines. dxf reader for Scilab that extracts arcs, lines, and polylines from. dxf is an unwieldy file format to work with, but luckily someone has already written a nice. For instance, segments of what was a common arc on the theoretical part will be converted into discontinuous segments that may not share a common centre point.Ī better approach was to export the part as a. stl, and this causes trouble later when Scilab tries to reconstruct the shape. There’s some loss of accuracy when Solidworks discretizes the shape into an.

My program then groups the boundary edges into closed loops, figures out which loop defines the outer boundary of the part by checking which loop is the biggest, and then fits line and arc segments to the points: stl files isn’t the case.Ī better approach is to identify “boundary edges”, or edges connecting nodes on the physical boundaries of the part, by identifying edges that aren’t shared by two facets. This didn’t work very well, because it relies on points being close to each other, which for long, straight edges in. My first thought was to try to group the nodes using some kind of clustering algorithm, and I went as far as to implement a single-link clustering algorithm in Scilab. A part will have one outer contour and could have an arbitrary number of closed inner contours (windows). The next step is to try to group nodes into loops, or closed contours. This leaves me with essentially a planar graph. stl file by filtering out all facets that didn’t have a normal perpendicular to the face I wanted, and all facets that weren’t located on the z = 0 plane. stl, which discretizes the surface of a part into triangular facets and puts them in a file like this:įacet normal 0.000000e+000 0.000000e+000 1.000000e+000

My first approach was to export a part from Solidworks as an. Obviously this can be done with CAMWorks, Mastercam, etc., but for simple 2D operations I didn’t think it would be hard to make a simple, specialized, stripped-down path generator.Ĭonsider this piece, with an arbitrary shape with an arbitrary number of windows:

Essentially I wanted a simple tool to convert a 2D CAD model to a set of G-code instructions. This isn’t unlike what you’d need to program a router or a 3D printer. Generally this type of operation will be the first step in machining a complex part, and I thought it would be useful to have my own miniature CAM program to quickly generate G-code for an arbitrary milled part. I’ve been playing around with some different methods of generating contour milling programs for a 2.5 axis CNC mill.

How to use camworks with a stl