JPG LazyCam Corel Draw

[Bob La Londe]

Ok... I have a bunch of stuff enroute to build my first CNC Mill, and I have been playing with Lazy Cam to try and design a project. Basically a 2D plaque with text and an image sillouhette. I can bring the image into Corel Draw and save it as a DXF which LazyCam can read ok, but I don't get anything that looks at all like what I want. It looks like it should be an image that would machine well, but I am having some issues getting it into a form that works for this... Am I missing some simple process or should I look at a different CAM package? I tried just bringing into Lazy Cam directly as a jpg, and it was even worse.

[Bob La Londe]

Since posting I ran across a piece of software called simplycam that seems to do a pretty good job of vectorizing .jpg files. I don't mind registering it, but I was wondering if anybody here had used it and if the saved DXF files translated well into g-code for Mach 3 to process, or even if it can easily be placed in LazyCam to generate code for Mach?

Maybe I'm not even asking the right questions?

[jemmyell]

It is pretty easy to trace bitmaps in CorelDRAW by hand, and it gives superior results. See Jeff Harrisons "Learn How To Draw" at Macromonster:

http://www.macromonster.com/index.ph...=5&id_pages=12

This is one of the best tutorials on Bezier tracing I have seen.

For the DXF, you can download a trial copy of my DXFTool from Tom Caudle at CandCNC.com:

http://www.candcnc.com/

See the 'Software' button.

AND you can get a free beta copy of DragonCNC for CorelDRAW at http://www.dragoncnc.com which comes with a post processor for Mach3.

This is an early beta. As soon as I get drill points working I will release a new one with plasma support and more 'stuff'.

-James Leonard

[Bob La Londe]

Originally Posted by jemmyell AND you can get a free beta copy of DragonCNC for CorelDRAW at http://www.dragoncnc.com which comes with a post processor for Mach3.-James Leonard

That looks promising.

[Bob La Londe]

Well, so far it looks like the easiest free software to use is Inkscape to convert rastor to vector graphics. The problem is lazy cam can't handle much detail. It will handle PLAIN SVG files output from Inkscape. Just not with much detail.

On the positive side its pretty easy to just make a project out of a bunch of little files, use lazy cam to convert them to code, then cut and paste them together, and edit some of the dimensions. Lazy Cam does some weird things to the Z dimension for some reason. I've broken a couple engraving points because of it until I relaized what was happenening. That or had to re cut a project because it set a bunch of the runs at Z0.0000 for no good reason.

I may sit down and write my own little text editor with its own process to check for out of whack dieemenions. Maybe editing my G-code in a spread would make it easy to search for < or > conditions before running.

Now I guess I need to sit down and read the inkscape manual to make modeling in 3D a little easier. Its got some cool tools to do it though.

Sorry, learning to many software tools at once GSimple is the 3 D software I am playig with it the moment. Inkscape is what I am using to convert rastor to vector.