2.4 Development is already under way. D2 posted this evening with a new ability to add/remove manual supports in FDM mode. This was a long time coming, and I’m excited with the way it turned out.
2.4 Roadmap (target 2020 EOY)
CNC
engraving and other tracing of contour lines (like pockets that match a tool size)
milling visualization: will show stock, tool, and animate cuts
manual placement of tabs and new tab shapes
fixes for climb / conventional, wide cutout, and thru holes
FDM
manual supports
continuous printing (z belt printers)
^^ limited functionality for now
Laser
drag knife gcode output
All Modes
2D image import conversion to 3D part
smarter layout when “auto” is disabled so that parts don’t move or overlap
Please keep the excellent feedback and bug reports coming.
Great job on the progress of the 2.4.D2 CNC mode. I should be receiving my LongMill sometime in December and will be testing KM extensively and providing feedback.
One feature that would be beneficial to the tabs would be to be able to place them in the middle of the stock(vertically). This would allow to flip a part, cut the second side and keep the part attached to the stock without needing different hold down method for the 2nd side.
Another feature that would be beneficial would be to add 3 registering holes instead of 2 (asymmetrically). This would avoid flipping the part in the wrong direction by mistake or I may be using a gcode from a part I may have cut 6mo ago and may not remember which way to flip the part. For the first side the part would be cut like normal, then the 3 registering holes would be drilled at least halfway through the stock. Then the part would be removed and the 3 registering holes that were drilled on the first side would be mirrored and drilled into the spoilboard. Now the part is flipped in only one possible matching direction and the second side cut. I hope I make sense.
You should already be able to use tabs as you suggest since they are calculated relative to the z bottom. So when you flip your part, you keep the tabs at the midline and secured to the stock.
I forgot the tabs are calculated relative to the z bottom.
The registration whole suggestion was based on me damaging a few jobs I did while using a friends CNC. I placed registration wholes as you have implemented in KM and being in a rush I flipped parts in the wrong direction but since the holes matched I was not able to prevent the mistake. I learned about this registration method from a Vectric Aspire video I saw on YouTube.
Hello Stewart. I’ve been playing around with KM some more and I don’t know if I am doing something wrong, but I am trying to place 8 tabs on a part, but can only see 3. Also the outline function seems to be cutting through the tabs.
If the outline pass is cutting through the tab, it’s a bug. Can you send me a profile export with workspace included when this bug is showing on your screen?
this has been long on my todo list. it’s the most basic implementation of animation I could imagine. solid rendering will take 20x the memory and a good deal more cpu. so this will help with testing in the meantime. there are small model / stock / cut alignment issues in the current code. I will fix that in future releases.
so this might be a little controversial. hope not. just pushed D4 and it has manual tab support. yay. it’s awesome. however, I had to disable traditional tab support to make it work.
nope. that’s not entirely out of the question for slow speeds. however, render speed is aggressively limited by the cpu overhead of the computation and to a lesser extent the rate at which UI update messages can be processed.
