Zomadicam: A SketchUp to Shopbot Partfile Generator
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Thanks for the post, Rob, and welcome to the SketchUp Community Forums at SketchUcation.
This project of yours is very interesting. However, many people who use SketchUp and Ruby might not be terribly familiar with CNC routers, the terminology involved, or what you would want a CNC router for. I'll post a link here to your Zomadic site's gallery: http://www.zomadic.com/Zomadic/Photos%20Page.html
To catch more interest from the non-fabricators among us, you might want to post some images and explanations directly into this forum thread.
Fascinating work...I look forward to going through this all when I have fewer deadlines hanging over my head. I used to work in a fabrication lab where I ran a BBC Precix router (among other things), and to get it to mill out SketchUp models was an exasperating struggle.
--Lewis
[Lewis Wadsworth]
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Thank you for the compliments.
I think the period in that picture link messed it up. Here it is again.
there also plenty more here.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zomadic/se ... 283371440/
To learn more about the tools I use to transform my sketchup models to reality go here http://www.shopbottools.com
[Rob]
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Really nice. Welcome to the forum
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Looks god rob,
Do you think this is also possible with a multicam router ?
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This is cool! I've always wanted a ShopBot and now I want one even more. There's no room for one in my shop though.
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Certainly output for different machine types is a possibility. With a few mods to the architecture a ruby scripter should be able to add a 'plugin' to the plugin which adds g-code output for Multicam or whatever.
[Rob]
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Hi Rob,
Some of the top furniture makers in the UK use this type of facility for making their templates when doing curved work.A guy called Brain Jordan writes for Furniture and Cabinet making mag and produces some beautiful stuff. Creates the necessary CAD file, emails the profile to the likes of a similar company in the UK, and gets perfect templates produces.
welcome
Alan
a fellow chippy. -
Lewis
Shine me up
Attached is a file that I hope answers your question.
Alan -
I'm still trying to work with the zomadicam for my shopbot ... still a lot of playing to do.
However .. those who mentioned using SU to create templates on a CNC machine ... I'd be really interested in knowing how you overcome the fact that SU does curves in straight line segments, albeit little ones.
Next week I plan on running some tests on circles, curves, bezier curves, etc. each with differing numbers of segments per curve to try and see if there is any magic number of segments where you can get an "effectively" smooth curve on a cnc directly from a SU created dxf
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I'm working on some different samples of basic Sketchup files for the plugin. Uploading to the site soon.
The number of segments you'll want in a curve will depend on the size of the arc and the overall dimension.
I've hardly made a science out of it but I find that cutting from circles of 360 segments or arcs of 90 segments yields "perfect" results.
That is to say, other factors affecting edge quality off the cnc machine are greater than the segmentation effect. I suppose the goal would be that the peaks between any two chords along the curve should be less than 1/32nd or maybe 1/64th.
As a simple exercise, one should be able create a partfile to cut a circle by following these steps
- Draw the circle on the red-green plane and make a component out of it.
- Set the z-zero to your material thickness: menu select Plugins->Zomadic Tools->Zomadicam->set z-zero
- Select the circle component and menu select Plugins-> Zomadic Tools-> Zomadicam-> Transform selected Geometry to Toolpath
- Select the new toolpath group generated from step 3 and menu select Plugins-> Zomadic Tools-> Zomadicam-> write selected Toolpath Geometry to partfile
I'm working on incorporating Shopbot's built in curve commands for arccurves when appropriate but it's tricky when the curve has been scaled in some fashion.
[Rob]
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