A sneak peek at the competition

[Death Adder]

I'd advise anyone involved in the current discussion about cutting simulation software to check out the two following programs:

CutViewer (www.cutviewer.com)
Metacut (www.metacut.com)

Both do approximately what we are discussing doing. I really like Metacut but it's 600-2500 dollars. I've got Surfcam but their entry level solid block visualization is kinda slow and not very feature rich. Cutview is like Metacut light and it crashes a lot for me. It's 400 dollars though so it's cheaper than Metacut.

It's always good to see what's out there and what other people did before you try it yourself. It looks like metacut uses the grid idea that I had. You can see on the verification screen a little grid icon w/ a size next to it. It's a lot larger than what I was talking about using. I'm not sure what exactly they are doing. Metacut is really, really fast though and allows for free rotating and zooming. I really like that. All in all, I would recommend Metacut to anyone who has the 600 bucks to spend and wants a very nice visualization program. Still, I want to make my own. ;-)

Another thing to consider. If we really do get this off of the ground we aren't going to make friends out of the people at CutViewer and Metacut. Cross yourselves off of their Christmas card list. I can't imagine the current guys appreciating a freeware clone. Not that we'll probably ever code up all of the features that they have.

[ger21]

You can get Cutviewer for $150 if you buy it with MeshCAM. http://www.grzsoftware.com/buy.php

[mpictor]

What about the backplot preview in AXIS? It runs the code through EMC's interpreter, so it is guaranteed to be right.

http://axis.unpy.net
http://www.linuxcnc.org

Mark

[rweatherly]

mpictor:

Your references look interesting. Are all of the downloads source code only, and if so, how difficult is it to compile into an executable program?

[Death Adder]

Originally Posted by rweatherly mpictor: Your references look interesting. Are all of the downloads source code only, and if so, how difficult is it to compile into an executable program?

Well, open source linux apps tend to be source code distributions. Usually building the app boils down to:

./configure --(any options you need)
make
make install

The build scripts do all of the work for you. It really isn't too hard to compile apps on linux.

[mpictor]

Originally Posted by Death Adder Well, open source linux apps tend to be source code distributions. Usually building the app boils down to: ./configure --(any options you need) make make install The build scripts do all of the work for you. It really isn't too hard to compile apps on linux.

Sorry I didn't check back earlier.

This particular set of programs isn't so easy to build, because EMC requires a custom version of Linux. If you have some spare space on your hard-drive, download an ISO image for Ubuntu at http://www.ubuntu.com/download, burn to CD, boot, and install. If you have a slow connection, you can also get a cd in the mail. Follow the instructions at the top of http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emc...nstalling_EMC2 to install EMC2 and AXIS onto Ubuntu.

Note that the "Desktop" cd is a LiveCD - you can test drive it without putting anything on your hard drive. However, since EMC2 requires a specially-built kernel - the core of the operating system - you cannot install and run EMC2 from the live session; you must install to disk before downloading and installing EMC2/AXIS.

If you already have a version of linux installed, you could install EMC2 onto it. Read the rest of the page on installing EMC2 - it could be easy or hard, depending on what distro you have.

Mark

[rweatherly]

Thanks Mark. That's a little much for me. I have been doing my simulation using a "quick and dirty" method: Creating a Z-map, and converting the z values to produce a grey-scale bitmap image. It won't do all of the fancy stuff, but it gives a good impression of the final result.