I spent a few hours working on it today. It still does the same thing, but the postprocessor is now template driven.
I must confess first that I'm currently LEARNING C... but I still wish to get involved into a similar project. |
It is written in Perl, not C, since that is what I know best. I could port the code to Python or C, although I would have to change the name to something other than PerlCAM.
WOW!!! I did'nt thought you were already carving 3D out of latex |
LOL. I traced that in SodiPodi for the acrylic panel.
Anyways, I've attached the current code as a zip file. You should be able to run it on Windows if you install Cygwin and run it in that. To change the cutting depth, you can edit the templates. The default is -0.1.
It includes a test SVG file that should work.
I have not yet tested this version on my CNC machine, so I'm not sure if the g-code output is correct or not. I'll probably test it later today. I haven't found any good CNC backplotters that work with Linux yet, so testing takes a while.
The easiest way to engrave something with it and SodiPodi is to load the original drawing or photo in SodiPodi, trace it with the freehand draw tool, and use the node edit tool to fit the curve better. .20 was a good line size for this. As long as all the nodes are either straight lines or cornered bezier curves, it should work. Smooth curves aren't supported in the parser yet, but the cornered ones do everything they do and more.
Also, the output will be mirrored from the SVG file, since the origins are different(top left vs bottom left). You can mirror the drawing in the SVG editor to fix this. I'll add a mirror translation option in the program later.