Messages

31

CamBam help (General usage) / Re: Nesting

« on: December 06, 2018, 08:00:47 am »

I had a quick play with it. The solutions were not very optimal, but I probably could live with that for one-off projects if it saves me a lot of time manually placing parts. It's pretty annoying that it moves everything to layer 0. What kills it for me though is that it loses text entities (so the labels telling me which part is which are gone), and it loses points and converts circles to polylines (so I can't easily do drilling operations on holes).

32

CamBam help (General usage) / 3D Profiling, Z Plunges in the Corners

« on: May 27, 2018, 09:29:29 am »

Hi, I've just been experimenting for the first time with the 3D profiling operation. I created a sloping flat rectangular surface from the attached text file and used a horizontal 3D profile operation to taper the top face of my part. It worked great! Just one odd thing - why is it doing several full depth Z plunges in the top left and top right corners, and is there a way to prevent it?

I'm using version 0.9.8P.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BjRnZqjggXY/

33

CamBam help (General usage) / Re: Clean off top of part

« on: October 03, 2017, 07:18:03 am »

There are many ways to do facing.  For a rectangular piece, I do it this way:

1) Draw a line parallel to one side and just outside and longer on each end by the diameter of the cutter.

2) Define a profile MOP on that line.

3) Specify cut width sufficiently large to cover the entire piece, with stepover as appropriate

4) Set direction to Mixed

Wow! This tip is a hidden gem. I nearly always face off the top of my stock as the first operation, and have been searching for a way to avoid spiralling out from the centre.

34

CamBam help (General usage) / Re: cumputer requirements

« on: August 14, 2016, 06:03:06 am »

Also I wonder what exactly you are doing with your current computer that is producing bad results. Upgrading it to a faster machine may just let you produce the same bad results more quickly!

35

CamBam help (General usage) / Re: cumputer requirements

« on: August 14, 2016, 05:57:52 am »

I would take the free Mac. I'm using CamBam on two nine-year-old MacBook Pro laptops. On one of them I use VirtualBox to run Windows XP at the same time as Mac OS X. On the other one I use BootCamp to dual-boot into either Mac OS or Windows. VirtualBox and BootCamp are both free; I had to buy the Windows licenses but they weren't very expensive.

36

Members Projects / Re: Trinket Boxes

« on: December 29, 2015, 18:41:13 pm »

Thanks Bubba!

37

Members Projects / Re: Trinket Boxes

« on: December 29, 2015, 18:31:56 pm »

Thanks a lot, Bob and Lloyd! I enjoyed making them and learned a lot about CamBam in the process, and the recipients seemed pleased.

38

Members Projects / Trinket Boxes

« on: December 29, 2015, 10:17:04 am »

Here's a blog post about some trinket boxes I made as Christmas presents:
http://www.holdenconcertinas.com/?p=423

39

CamBam help (General usage) / Re: Drilling

« on: December 19, 2015, 07:44:36 am »

Unfortunately G81 won't work because Smoothie doesn't support canned drill cycles.
http://smoothieware.org/supported-g-codes

Perhaps something could be done with the "Custom Script" drilling method? I'm not sure how that feature of CamBam works.

I'm using grbl, which has the same limitation, but I wrote my own GUI for it so I got around the problem by writing a pre-processor that converts drill cycles into sequences of G0 and G1 linear moves.

40

Feature Requests / Re: Direct entry via a command line

« on: December 18, 2015, 08:53:30 am »

I also like the Autocad-style command line (though I use QCad because I can't afford Autocad). When I know the locations of a set of features in advance, I find it quicker and less error-prone to just type them in.

Also nice being able to access it without leaving the keyboard at all, e.g. <space>rect<enter>0,0<enter>100,100<enter>.

41

Members Projects / Re: How to clean up mill marks on end grain hardwood

« on: December 12, 2015, 09:19:17 am »

Much easier? Drum sander. Wash off the dust with water and let it dry to raise the grain, then smooth by hand with a card scraper or very fine sandpaper.

Personally I don't have a drum sander so I would start with a sharp low angle block plane (no. 60 1/2) set to take a very light cut, with the corners of the iron cambered a tiny bit to avoid making track marks. Chamfer the edges a little and work from the outside in to avoid splintering. It will be hard work on those woods but should leave a very smooth finish. Once you've got rid of the mill marks, any remaining planing marks can easily be removed with a card scraper.

Edit: removed mention of electric planer. On second thoughts not a good idea on end grain.

42

Post Processors (*.cbpp) / Re: Post Processor needed for DIY Machine

« on: December 12, 2015, 08:56:09 am »

Grbl won't have a problem with the extra G0s.

There is a potential issue with the spindle speed depending on how grbl was configured. If the VARIABLE_SPINDLE setting was left at the default enabled setting, it will output a PWM signal proportional to the spindle speed commanded by the most recent S word. The laser may not be happy with anything other than a steady on/off signal. I think if you simply command a speed greater than or equal to the maximum speed (default 1000RPM), grbl will output 100% duty cycle, which is effectively the same thing as 5V DC.

On the other hand, if the manufacturer took the trouble to disable VARIABLE_SPINDLE and recompile, the S words will be ignored.

43

Post Processors (*.cbpp) / Re: Post Processor needed for DIY Machine

« on: December 07, 2015, 20:36:38 pm »

Grbl is able to handle G2 and G3, so the convert to lines shouldn't be necessary.

44

Scripts and Plugins / Re: Fillet-Chamfer plugin

« on: December 07, 2015, 08:33:44 am »

Hi David, thanks for the plugin. It solves a problem I was having with a curved shape with several sharp points that needs to fit inside a routed pocket.

When I first tried it, clicking on the points of the shape did nothing (no error message, just nothing happened). It took me a little bit of time to figure out why and how to get around it, so I thought I would write this down in case anyone else runs into it.

My shape is fairly complicated and was generated by an illustration package. When I selected it and did Polyline->Edit I saw that it had lots of points spread out all along the polyline, but especially concentrated around the sharp corners. The fillet plugin, as far as I can tell, only works if the polyline has no points other than the corner point within the requested fillet radius.

I first tried simply doing Polyline->Arc Fit with various different tolerances to reduce the number of points on the polyline. I found that if I used a fairly small tolerance like 0.1mm, several of the corners but not all of them became clean enough that I could use the fillet plugin on them. Unfortunately I couldn't get all the corners to become 'filletable' at once unless I set the Arc Fit tolerance to nearly 1mm, which is too much error for my part. What eventually worked for me was doing an Arc Fit with 0.09mm, filleting all the corners that I could, then doing a second Arc Fit with the same value (so I had a total Arc Fit tolerance of 0.18mm). For some reason the second Arc Fit removed enough points around the remaining sharp corners that I was now able to fillet them.

45

Post Processors (*.cbpp) / Re: Post Processor needed for DIY Machine

« on: December 06, 2015, 10:41:39 am »

Blimey, that's cheap. I don't see any eye protection though.

First we need to know what kind of controller it has. What circuit board does the USB cable connect to? Does it look like an Arduino Uno or Nano clone?

If you use a serial terminal program to talk to the virtual serial port that appears when you plug it in, when you press enter does it reply with a line that looks something like "Grbl 0.9j ['$' for help]"?
Use 8N1 no flow control; if you get no or a garbled response at 115200 baud then try 9600 baud.