CAM simulation for the Path Workbench

[shaise]

It could move into the TC and then simulation (or anything else that needs it) could ask the TC for it's shape. Does that make sense?

I definitely agree the toolpath should visualize the tool so the user can see the changes. I also think that it should show some kind of a 2d graphic representation so the user will understand the meaning of each parameter - something like in other CAM SW, ie Mastercam:

tooledit.png (18.18 KiB) Viewed 1958 times

I would gladly help on both things, however this involves working on the master freecad code, and I am not there yet.

shai

[roivai]

Wow! This is truly wonderful stuff! I played with very similar idea for maybe two nights and gave up after found out that OCC had weird bugs.. I am very glad you weren't a quitter like me and worked around them!

[bill]

Very cool, ; FYI ???

CAM_SIM.png (17.19 KiB) Viewed 1917 times

[shaise]

Ooops
soory for that. I just posted a fix...

[shaise]

Hi Everyone!

I have updated the macro a bit with much better UI and more control. The control is now in the Task panel. Pressing OK will keep the result part. Cancel will discard it. Added option to simulate selected operations.

SimTask.png (14.54 KiB) Viewed 1850 times

But here comes the bad news. I have tried one of sliptonics 'Torture' samples. Though the simulation went well, it was exteeeeeemly slow... , 1 hour 25 minutes to be exact...
This make this approach rather impractical.
Back to the drawing board.
I think I will try to write my own simulator from scratch in c++, as I have some experience with 3D mesh coding.
Here it the simulation video: https://youtu.be/uKcYLPnMeOo

[sliptonic]

This is still a very worthwhile effort to improve UI and figure out how it fits into the workflow.

If you're going to start digging deeper on a custom implementation, take some time to study awallin's code. It's GPL3 so not much we can use directly but worth learning from, I'm sure.

http://www.anderswallin.net/tag/cutsim/

[mlampert]

Here it the simulation video: https://youtu.be/uKcYLPnMeOo

Oops - it's milling the square hole from the bottom up! Could you post the generated g-code and/or the FC file with the Path in it so I can have a look at it?

[shaise]

Hi Mlampert,

Here is the FC file.
Thanks again for your work!
By the way, is there a way to hide the path lines? The standard hide functionality does not affect them, they are always visible.

shai

[ickby]

One way to speed up things a bit could be to increase.the Boolean tolerance. Na default it uses 1e-7, reducing this to e.g. 1e-3 may speed up things and us still good enough for the purpose.

Tolerance is a parameter to the Boolean functions.

[mlampert]

ping

Realthunder could you have a look at this please?

I checked that file and the pockets are - weird. Some of them get milled from the bottom up, and two of them get milled in two parts, first upwards from about 3/4 of the total depth to the starting depth, and then downwards from 3/4 to the final depth. It's also changing the patterns on those boundaries (you can see it clearly if you switch to "top view", very noticeable on the cylinder and square holes on the bottom left