I finally got around to ordering some plastic bits and bobs including some 3mm yellow-black-yellow engraving laminate to play with.

After a bit of inspiration I realised, if I engraved a CamBam bitmap heightmap into it using a V engraving cutter, the deeper the cut, the wider the black line would be, giving the heightmap a shaded appearance.

I am using the same 60 degree engraving bit that I use for my PCB Isolation milling which gives a nice fine line. For pockets I am using a 0.8 chip breaker bit which I also use for PCBs.

I also tested some other CamBam operations including plain engraving, pocketing and some island-like milling. These all worked well, but it has highlighted that my machine backlash is getting pretty bad so I should press on with my machine upgrade (If I can tear myself away from playing with the pretty plastic).

For the heightmap I am using Z min -0.5mm, Z max =0mm and a Y step of 0.7mm.

Some nice beta program you have there. Can't beat that price :)

While not quite what I had in mind, this is a heightmap engraving in a piece of clear acrylic. I was hoping to side light the acrylic with some LEDs so deeper cuts were lighter. I've not tried LEDs yet, but I think it may need to be deeper cuts to have the required effect. Interesting though.

This is my late dog Stella having her legs gnawed by a friend in the snow.

I wonder what a backlight, reverse engrave laminate would look like? I bet it would look pretty cool!

Nice work!

Scott

I have been using Cam Bam for a while now and while I am still a newbie I couldn't live without it. I only wish there was a single pass font such as
stick40 that would work in cambam. For some reason when I try to use stick40 some of the letters and numbers don't show up but stick40 works in other dxf text editors such as deskengrave. Anyway thanks Cambam... You are the hobbyists friend.

Oh BTW...

If anyone knows of any single pass fonts I would be in your debt.

My favorite cnc software list:

CamBam
Kcam
DeskEngrave
Inkscape
WinTopo

Hi there, and thank you very much for the kind words! :rainfro:

The text routines attempt to turn fonts into regions so that islands are automatically detected for profiling and pockets. I had only used a quick region test assuming most fonts are usually well defined. Some stick font characters were breaking this routine.

Stick40 does work in the current free version, apart from the following characters 'R g 6 8 9'.

I have added a fix for this into the current CamBam+ development version and I will be putting out a bug fix release in the next couple of days. I will put a fix in the CamBam free version as well, but this needs a lot of work to bring it in line with the CamBam+ release so may not be available for a few weeks.

There is a bit of info on Stick Fonts here...
http://www.cambam.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,267.0.html
Where some one has also uploaded another stick font.

Thanks for pointing this out!

I may have found some other single pass fonts that work 100% rather than stick 40 on the CAmBAm forum thanks to you and other CamBam users. For others who have this problem do a search for free fonts named ISOCP,
ISOCP2, ISOCP3, ISOCT.. I also a search for monofonts that also turned up some promising results. The sign that was giving me problems was a retirement sign for a friend. I needed the "R" and "8" (Retired 2008). :-) In the past I avoided numbers and letters that didn't work.

These forums always have an answer to my questions. I have done many signs that turned out really nice (my opinion) simply due to Cambam. I'm not a CAD person and CamBam is what I use to edit DXF files.

Here are some pics of signs I made using CamBam. Nothing spectacular for most users but I like them. Again.....THANK YOU CAMBAM, KCAM, STEPPERWORLD, INKSCAPE and forum members who took the time to help a newbie.

That's great mlind and thanks very much for the font info.

I have just put out an interim bug fix release that should solve this and a few other problems found to date. More information is here...
http://www.cambam.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,291.0.html

Nice engravings! Would you mind if I stuck them up on the CamBam user gallery?

Just one more thought on stick fonts...I am not a big fan of them myself. If you do an inside profile of a normal font using a v cutter it looks almost single stroke (sometimes a lot better). Is not as efficient as some stick fonts but there is a lot more choice of type face as well.
More info
http://www.cambam.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,88.0.html

Have Fun!

Feel free to post those engravings on the CamBam forum. If it wasn't for CamBam they and an entire garage full of other engravings wouldn't exist. Its time for a garage sale.... :-).

Thats a great Idea using a V-Cutter and doing an inside profile. I'll have to get a couple V-cutters and give it a try. Sounds like some neat possibilities.

I agree with you about stickfonts. The only reason I use stickfonts is because with a small bit I can do smaller text letters. I engrave on wood and as such other fonts that cut on the outside perimeter of a letter have a tendency to tear out sections of the letters especially with when the text is small even when Z is set shallow. With one pass fonts I don't have tearout problems. Wood can be difficult at times.

I'll check out the links you provided below. Thank you..... II plan on trying CamBAm+ within a week or so. I look forward to it...