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Current State of Laser Cutting Workflow?
Michael_1
Member Posts: 5 ✭
I use Onshape primarily to make semi-complicated laser-cut assemblies, doing final layout in Inkscape. Up until now I had been using the right-click -> export to DXF workflow, but it is really tedious. I often have 4 or more of the same part, so while my assembly reflects that I have to manually do the bookkeeping and duplicate the parts in Inkscape (along with doing the general layout).
On top of that, I often hit some sort of bug where a subset of the features in the DXF are in the wrong spot in Inkscape - I'm not sure whose end that's on, but I can generally either fix it by hand or alter the part in some way to get the DXF to generate correctly (usually this happens when the face is generated by a sketch with multiple faces, and properly marking edges as "construction" fixes it). Again, with lots of parts this can be a pain.
In my mind it seems like it should be possible to do this all automatically - take an assembly, find all parts with a given thickness (I put it in a variable at the beginning of all my Part Studios) and then lay them out. How great would that be! I tried the Kiri:Moto slicer, but unfortunately not only did I still have to do manual layout and part selection, but the files it exported subtlety distorted my measurements, wasting an $80 laser cutting job
I should have double checked the measurements, of course.
Anyway, does anybody have any solution to this? I looked at FeatureScript, but it didn't look like I had access to the dxf export functionality. Maybe the proper third-party API would be able to do this?
Thanks!
On top of that, I often hit some sort of bug where a subset of the features in the DXF are in the wrong spot in Inkscape - I'm not sure whose end that's on, but I can generally either fix it by hand or alter the part in some way to get the DXF to generate correctly (usually this happens when the face is generated by a sketch with multiple faces, and properly marking edges as "construction" fixes it). Again, with lots of parts this can be a pain.
In my mind it seems like it should be possible to do this all automatically - take an assembly, find all parts with a given thickness (I put it in a variable at the beginning of all my Part Studios) and then lay them out. How great would that be! I tried the Kiri:Moto slicer, but unfortunately not only did I still have to do manual layout and part selection, but the files it exported subtlety distorted my measurements, wasting an $80 laser cutting job
I should have double checked the measurements, of course.Anyway, does anybody have any solution to this? I looked at FeatureScript, but it didn't look like I had access to the dxf export functionality. Maybe the proper third-party API would be able to do this?
Thanks!
0
Comments
Once that lays out the parts you can then sketch on that surface and convert all edges, then right-click/DXF export the sketch.
Note that since they're doing a rectangular binary tree search, it will in general be a very inefficient layout for non-rectangular parts; currently I just clone all my parts into an extra part studio and transform them by hand before doing the convert to sketch/single export option.
You may also be interested in a suite of laser-cut design tools I've been working on in FS, including Laser Joint, T-Slot Joint, and Kerf Compensation. A shape-sensitive auto-layout tool with a better heuristic is on my list of projects to do as I get time.
PhD, Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University
Your T-Slot tool is great - I'll likely be using that in the future!
I'll take a stab at it this evening - if I get something I'll post a github link.
https://github.com/mharradon/stl2svg
It turns curves into many small line segments - I'm not sure how laser cutters will handle that, but otherwise it works as long as the part's thinnest dimension is the thickness of the panel and it's aligned with the coordinate axes. I'll be fixing that and adding layout so it exports all the parts to a single file (though Onshape only exports a single copy of the part from assemblies - maybe exporting as a single file keeps track of duplicate parts).
PhD, Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University