William:

I purchased MeshCAM specifically so that I could take STLs generated by
OpenSCAD and create them on my Shapeoko.  That works to a large extent,
but MeshCAM is a bit quirky and is not updated that often.  Generating
the gCode directly from OpenSCAD would be interesting.  MeshCAM includes
multiple passes (rough and finishing) with different cutting tools. 
Perhaps too much to expect from your experiment.  In any event, nice
seeing you thinking outside of the box

Jon

On 1/15/2024 9:56 AM, William F. Adams via Discuss wrote:

Hello!
excuse the noob question, but it seems to me that writing a slicer is not a
trivial task? I am switching between cura and icesl (both have advantages
and disadvantages)  and both are in heavy development for some time?
So if you absolutely don't want to switch programs,probably a named pipe
towards e.g. icesl (which is open source too) would be better than
reinventing the wheel?
excuse me if i am offtopic :D but the problem seemed weird to me....

ciao
bboett

Am Mo., 15. Jan. 2024 um 16:06 Uhr schrieb jon via Discuss <
discuss@lists.openscad.org>:

--
ciao
Bruno

---==========
http://nohkumado.eu/, http://bboett.free.frhttp://aikido.nohkumado.eu/,
http://bboett.free.fr
http://aikido.zorn.free.fr

On 15.01.24 19:17, Bruno Boettcher via Discuss wrote:

What? Where?

All I can see is a "binary" license which in strict reading would not
even permit normal private use, it only mentions "research use".

Where's the source code?

ciao,
Torsten.

On Monday, January 15, 2024 at 01:18:18 PM EST, Bruno Boettcher via Discuss discuss@lists.openscad.org wrote:

Decidedly not, hence my weird approach.

This G-code is for a subtractive CNC router (or mill).

I don't know of any similar projects --- the closest would be CAMotics:
https://camotics.org/

but I don't like Javascript, and since they did a controller for a company which competes with the one I work for, that's not an option.

It is weird.
The idea is to avoid the need for CAM software (or to simplify using CAM software) by directly modeling the tool movement, and recording that either as G-code, or in a DXF.
A good example of a problem which this works around is slots which are exactly the same diameter as the tool --- when describing as outlines it is necessary to add 10% or so so that rounding issues won't interfere with the calculations of whether the tool fits or no.
I'm going to post a template file to my Github now, then work on adding support for arcs --- once I've got that done I'll try to work up an example file which explains this better.
I did do one compleat example, a flattening file:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/flatten.graph.tres

which when opened in OpenSCAD Graph Editor should show a radial flattening toolpath (some configuration will be necessary, including installing gcodepreview).
William

Ah yes, you have to ask them directly...
French universities still have problems with public code repositories....

Ciao

Bruno Böttcher

35 rue de la république, FR-6720 Schwindratzheim
email: bboett@adlp.org, mobile:bboett@gmail.com
Fon:+33 3 88 89 91, Mob:+33 6 76 55 82 68

Dev: Java/Perl/PHP OS:GNU/LINUX, Android
Aïkido: http://aikido.zorn.free.fr, http://www.aikido-club-saverne.fr

Torsten Paul via Discuss discuss@lists.openscad.org schrieb am Mo., 15.
Jan. 2024, 20:44:

UPDATE: So I finally got CadQuery/CQ-editor installed and spent about three
hours playing with it today to design a simple part.

Conclusion: I will probably NOT be switching over to CadQuery.

I found the user interface to be clunky, and the editor is very basic with
little in the way of preferences.

CadQuery is very flexible, but flexibility breeds complexity.  The learning
curve is very steep.

In practice, I found it to work just as if you were documenting each step
you would take if you were using a drawing program such as TinkerCAD,
FreeCADD, etc. For simple parts, each line of code (or each layer in the
stack of functions) corresponds with a similar action on a drawing program:
Select a plane, do some 2D drawing, then cut or extrude, select some edges,
apply chamfer/fillets, and then repeat.

The devil is in the details and in understanding what is going on under the
hood (bonnet).  For example, I could extrude a regular polygon, but I could
not extrude a polyline (created from a list of points).  After much
searching, I found that one must use the .close() function between the
polyline and the extrude.

Of course, your mileage may vary and if you are transitioning from a
drawing program you may find it easier than this old guy.

End of report.

On Mon, Jan 15, 2024 at 7:44 AM jon via Discuss discuss@lists.openscad.org
wrote:

On 15.01.24 22:17, Bruno Boettcher via Discuss wrote:

That is not how open source works. At all.

CGAL is Universtity/French based too, so I don't really buy that claim
(https://geometryfactory.com/who-we-are/).

Quote "Andreas founded GeometryFactory in 2003 in order to commercialize
the technology accumulated through a series of European research
projects developing the CGAL library."

That is exactly what IceSL did/does.

ciao,
Torsten.

Well as said, french universities have, usually, indeed a problem with open
source (I made my PhD at one...) since in the administrative layers there's
the big illusion of successful software/hardware patents and the big
money....
But also, usually, it's possible to retrieve, under the guise of a
federated project, the stuff under a Eugpl like license (since the people
writing the stuff usually are in the inverse opinion) ...

But no matter, indeed I didn't knew there weren't any open source CNC
"slicers"

Ciao

Bruno Böttcher

35 rue de la république, FR-6720 Schwindratzheim
email: bboett@adlp.org, mobile:bboett@gmail.com
Fon:+33 3 88 89 91, Mob:+33 6 76 55 82 68

Dev: Java/Perl/PHP OS:GNU/LINUX, Android
Aïkido: http://aikido.zorn.free.fr, http://www.aikido-club-saverne.fr

Torsten Paul via Discuss discuss@lists.openscad.org schrieb am Di., 16.
Jan. 2024, 05:56:

CadQuery is very powerful; it's for the power user, much like UNIX can be compared to Windows. A power user who does not fear learning things would always gravitate towards UNIX or a UNIX-like system (even MacOS I suppose).

Yes you're right, the installation of CadQuery and of cq-editor was a bit more difficult than is typical, and it's because these tools live in "Python world" which needs to know how to load libs etc. That's why they have tools such as conda, anaconda, mambaforge, etc. to handle library dependencies and library installations. Even I was not an expert in Python but I was able to install these tools after careful reading and a few trial and error steps. Yes it took a couple of hours in my case as well.

I still do like OpenSCAD, but for me it's crucial to have a tool that generates STEP files for CNC machining at my disposal. This is why I had to look beyond just OpenSCAD. Furthermore I'm very repulsed with the idea of using graphical user interfaces to create parts that are very similar to each other, with minor differences in between. In other words having a language with which to "program parts" is very agreeable with me; this is exactly what drew me to OpenSCAD initially.

Because CadQuery uses a B-rep lib as its backend, things like "shelling", "fillet", or even "chamfer" are built-ins. In other words smoothing things is easy; it's part of the backend library. These are frequently discussed topics on this forum. 'Helix' and other complex operations are also built-ins. Yes there is a learning curve with the extensive API, but once you start working on simple examples it becomes clearer and clearer. STL can be generated by CadQuery.

Well here is an example. Threads for screws are very easy to program. With about 300 lines of code I was able to write a complete thread library in two days, which generates both internal and external threads, with many options. (Now of course I will be maintaining it when I find bugs, which is expected because I'm using this in all of my projects.)

If you are interested in trying the thread generation code, it is here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/nl10/code/HEAD/tree/cq-code/common/metric_threads.py

If you add these few lines of code

show_object(internal_metric_thread(diameter=3.0,
pitch=0.5,
length=2.0,
bottom_chamfer=True,
base_tube_od=3.5))

to the bottom of thread lib linked above, opening in cq-editor will get you this:

[threads.png]

Cheers.

Sent with Proton Mail secure email.

On Monday, January 15th, 2024 at 9:15 PM, Leonard Martin Struttmann via Discuss discuss@lists.openscad.org wrote: