Managing Contours for laser cutting

Hi All,

Tried a couple searches but came up with nothing. I'm curious if, given a series of contours that are in the GH shaded geometry, is it possible to grab each on and sequentially array them, then flatten them in a line to make a series of laser cut sheets?

If anyone knows of a discussion to link please share, much appreciated.

-BC

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Arend on September 21, 2014 at 11:10am

I usually use these steps:

1. Grab a plane of each curve (using for example the planar component, or perhaps using the contour planes)

2. Place them all in the origin using a orient command

3. Find the largest bounding box

4. Place them in a grid using the rectangular command, using the largest bouding box as rectangle.

Permalink Reply by martyn hogg on September 21, 2014 at 3:30pm

check out Bowerbird maybe... it has some cool waffling components that create sections through meshes. You can then orient these onto your XY plane for machining.

Also worth checking out is Dogbone if you need to add dogbone corners to internal corners - even a laser has a small radius, equivalent to about a 1mm diameter cutter I think.

Permalink Reply by BC on September 21, 2014 at 9:20pm

Thanks Arend, that seems like it should be a good system. I had gotten to the point where all the contours were oriented to the Origin point, but wasn't able separate/array them sequentially. I'll give it a shot and come back with the results. How exactly does one associate the center-point of each contour piece with the center points of the various rectangular grid?

Martyn - I should have been more clear. I've already got the series of contours in model space, but I've been struggling with separating them once I orient them to the xy-plane.

Permalink Reply by martyn hogg on September 22, 2014 at 12:42pm

Ah, OK.

The Bowerbird examples do show how to orient and arrange the contours and even number them using standard GH components..