Comment by danielheath

Comment by danielheath 14 hours ago

I've long imagined something comparable in use to OpenSCAD, but where the primitives are tool-paths rather than shapes; you specify the cuts (or prints) the machine will make, and get a render of how the material will look afterwards.

This would, of course, be a great hassle to use, but I think I'd really enjoy being able to eg preview the texture different tool heads / cut patterns would leave. I imagine thinking in terms of "how the machine will cut this" would also improve my ability to reason about the machine.

bronze 13 hours ago

Sounds like you just want to write GCode? There are some helpers to make it a little less tedious, like FullControllGcode. Gcode, especially for printers, is really 2 commands, G0 and G1, so writing your own helper is also pretty easy.

Reply View 1 reply

jacquesm 13 hours ago

There is a lot more to it than that. For instance, for overhangs and bridges you need fairly fine control of the fan in relationship to the movement of the extruder head. You'll need to do circular interpolation in such a way that the toolhead does not slow down too much or you'll get really crappy corners and seams and other joints can be really hard to do properly if you are just using naive point-to-point moves rather than lots of little tweaks to get partial overlap between the two adjacent paths. And then there is control of the extruder retraction and pressure advance, which are pretty complex and difficult to get right for even a subset of the most common use cases, especially if you want to have a range of speed options. "pretty easy" does not match my experience so far, but then again, I am only using this when the regular slicer can't cope so there is a chance that the problem is me.

Reply View | 0 replies