We use cookies to personalize content, interact with our analytics companies, advertising networks and cooperatives, and demographic companies, provide social media features, and to analyze our traffic. Our social media, advertising and analytics partners may combine it with other information that you’ve provided to them or that they’ve collected from your use of their services. Learn more.
I am working on cutting project, and last night was my first time running my latest revision.
In the bottom of some circle pockets, I added some slots to be carved in with my 1/8in bit (the circular holes were roughed out with my 1/4in bit). For some reason, it seems like Easel is creating gcode to carve out that slot from the top of the surface down. I filmed the behavior, and I saw it consistently across all four of my circles in my design. Any idea why it’s doing this? It’s more wasteful of time than anything else.
I’m not sure if Easel calculates the area that has already been carved out. I would venture to say that Easel does not know that there is no material there and your zero, being the surface of the wood, is what it is carving from.
It carves each area/depth independent of the others as if it’s not even aware of each one. Yes, it’s very annoying to watch it air carve. Easel isn’t programmed to ‘know’ that objects overlap and when they do to ignore previously carved areas. But hey,…Easel is free. You get what you pay for.
This is true, and I am thinking about paying for the Pro functions a bit since I am getting a lot of use out of the product. As much as free is nice, I also know that paying for a good product helps a good product stick around.
Hi @ErikHelgestad,
Could you please share the project? I will have a look.
@RaulFuster,
We do calculate the area we already carved out. However, there are scenarios in which our logic does not handle that well. We are constantly improving it.
If that’s the case, I’ve never seen it behave that way. I don’t have a project handy to illustrate, but I’ve experienced exactly what Erik has mentioned numerous times.
I am wrong. What was happening with mine which was frustrating was that during the roughing pass it would go around the path of the little anvils. So on the first part of the roughing instead of clearing out everything except the main logo in a structured way it actually created paths around each of the anvils. and cleared those to the same 1/8th as each object.
So instead of clearing everything out to 1/8" and then go back to the rough out the little anvils to 3/8" it created all sorts of extra paths around the anvils on the 1/8" rough out. Just a ton of wasted movements.
In my initial response, I was referring the extra movements in the detail pass. They shouldn’t be there. We will fix it.
However, your next response I see you are talking about extra movements in roughing.
When you set 0.08 as the roughing depth-per-pass, Easel generates layers as follows.
0.08 <- first clearing pass
0.125 <- first surface pass
0.16 <- second clearing pass
0.24 <- third clearing pass
0.32 <- fourth clearing pass
0.375 <- second (bottom) surface pass
Given second clearing pass is going to carve the openings of each little anvil next; the first surface pass excludes those openings. We do this to minimize unnecessary movements.
However, if you set 0.0625 (2 x 0.0625 = 0.125) as the roughing depth-per-pass, we do exactly two clearing passes. The second clearing pass also does the job of the first surface pass.
0.0625 <- first clearing pass
0.125 <- second clearing pass / first surface pass
0.1875 <-third clearing pass
0.25 <- fourth clearing pass
0.3125 <- fifth clearing pass
0.375 <- sixth clearing pass / second surface pass
Probably you can change the depth-per-pass to do that. However, the second approach adds one extra clearing pass.
Awesome on that part Ruwan. My second comment relates to the two images in the roughing pass.
I just assumed that while it was roughing down to 1/8" the cut paths would look more like the second image rather than all the extra movements in the first around the anvils. Since all that area is being cleared to the 1/8" It shouldnt create the paths around the little anvils like the first image shows it does.
Very interesting…Juan is right, it should just clear the whole area immediately above each little anvil as if they weren’t even going to be there. Afterwards, go back and carve each little anvil as if nothing else exists.
For triangle if we follow the above approach we would definitely save time. However, for circle, we will be increasing time, and also it would be carving in the air for a larger region.
Determining when to ignore a shape is a challenge. Ideally, during roughing we could ignore the triangle and consider only the circle to avoid “carving in the air”. We could look for a way to identify skinny shapes and ignore them (e.g. operations like polygon erode), however that would increase the toolpath generation time. We will definitely consider this approach, since reducing carving time is also one of our high priority items.
