Laser cut lettering

digitalcarbon

any simple way to do laser cut lettering on sheet metal parts?

For now I just want to say simple assembly instructions nothing fancy.

owen_sparks

Good news.

I used this today to do something similar.

The stencil font, Dave Cowden's "Surface Text" featurescript and some configs are a great combination.  I've not tried it with sheet metal though.

A quick zap on the Baby-Death-Star and they came out fine.

Cheers,

Owen S.

philip_thomas

@owen_sparks - Hey buddy, how about a link?
(and well done @dave_cowden, that looks like a very solution )

owen_sparks

@philip_thomas good point:-

clicky

Owen S.

digitalcarbon

wow! well done...

owen_sparks

Should have mentioned that as it's a stencil font it's great for laser, and the export to dxf is painless as it's just a right click on a face and export as there are no islands that would prevent this with a standard font.

Owen S.

dave_cowden

@owen_sparks
looks awesome!  that's a very good point about the dxf, because as we'e discussed in other threads, there's no single-stroke font, which would be FANtastic. 

@philip_thomas thanks for the props. I put quite a lot of work into that feature.  I'm glad its working well

<rant>
I've kind of missed developing featurescript plugins lately.  But I just can't justify the time. Onshape is a REALLY powerful CAD platform due to the extensibility via FeatureScript ( and i'm not kind of guessing at that-- I'm a fluent SolidWorks user too and I can say that using FS plugins is really nice compared to SW).  Not to be selfish, but at SOME point if you want people to make great, high quality features, you have to create a model to allow developers to get compensated....
</rant>

digitalcarbon

Yes, stencil is all i want

philip_thomas

@dave_cowden - We understand your position and we fully hope to one day offer a model that encourages both grass roots efforts as well as the potential to reward more intensive development efforts. Your features are some of the more popular and I just wanted to thank you for showing the community what is possible.

dave_cowden

@philip_thomas Thats good to hear! Let me know if I can help with the process. I'm passionate about the power of scripted CAD-- especially as it relates to generative geometry.  There's a lot of potential. In my view, its what will eventually set OnShape above the rest, though its definitely a long game.

owen_sparks

@digtalcarbon Nice, looks great.

@dave_cowden Thanks Dave, it's a heck of a lot easier with your feature

Cheers, Owen S.

bryan_lagrange

@dave_cowden @owen_sparks @philip_thomas

Great feature script for text.

Speaking of Stencil style text, I would love to see a feature script with the ability to edit the size of the spacing in the stencil style font. This is useful when cutting out text in parts by laser or plasma. 

The minimum space will vary depending on the type and thickness of material you are cutting through. 

For example if I were to laser cut an "O" in thin stainless (18GA) a minimum space of .030" will work and all the lettering (internal portion that is tabbed in by stencil) would stay in place. If I were to try this in 1/4" stainless the interal portion of the O would fall out because the heat that is produced to cut through thicker material burns the tabs away. 

Currently you are left with the spacing that is placed relative to the height you input. If the spacing is too small I have to manually increase the size of the spacing. 

If there was a feature script to set the height and the width of the tab of a stencil font would save loads of time.

Do you guys think there is anyway to do this? I have yet to see a CAD software offer this type of feature.

Thank you

Bryan Lagrange

dave_cowden

@bryan_lagrange surface text supports this, It is called kerning in thr feature . Have a look at the example, you can control the spexinf between every individual character by putting the spacing, separated by commas. 

bryan_lagrange

@dave_cowden

The kerning feature is great to maintain the space between the text. What I am also looking for is the ability to control the tabs in the text as well as shown in the highlighted area in the screen capture. Is this possible with this feature?

dave_cowden

No, unfortunately it is not. The text is created natively by onshape, and my feature can't modify the geometry it creates for each individual letter. 

To modify the spacing you are referring to, I would need to create the fonts from scratch..

I have considered doing that so that I could also support single stroke fonts, but it is a ton of work because of the tremendous number of character sets that would need to be supported. 

At some point I may write a font converter that will allow my text feature to import open fonts, but that would be a lot of work as well. 

I'm sorry I can't help more in this case! 

bryan_lagrange

@dave_cowden
Thank you for the feature script you have already created.

I would love to see Onshape to be the first to have a custom stencil font generator that you could control height, spacing, width of webbing of font, and width of tab creation. This would be a game changer for those in the manufacturing world that have to Text into metal (or other material). 

Maybe @philip_thomas could have this created.  

dave_cowden

@bryan_lagrange i have a feature request list that i'll add this to!

bryan_lagrange

thank you