Released 12 June 2009 build 0.9.3450.17151 Rev E (deadly donkey)

Download CamBamPlus-beta0.9.6e MSI Installer (5.60 MB)

New 3D profile machining operation.

The new 3D profile operation supports the following features.

• Waterline roughing and finishing methods.
• Z scanning roughing and finishing methods (similar to Bas Relief).
• Front face and back face machining
• Generation of molds
• Restriction of machining boundary to save machining time.
• Experimental additive support for extrusion heads.

The left hand buddha was finish machined at 2000mm/min resulting in a fuzzy finish (but total run time was only 45 minutes including a 3mm depth roughing pass and 0.3mm finish stepover). A faster spindle speed should have been used for the finish. The right buddha had a slower finish speed but the tool was referenced incorrectly resulting in roughing gouges. Practice makes perfect!

These files were made from a 1.5M face model from the wonderful Aim@Shape Shape Repository, down-sampled to 30K faces using the equally marvelous MeshLab application.

OpenGL drawing view.

The OpenGL view now supports the ShowCutWidths=True machining option. The cut width shading is now generated using a more sophiscated approach than the old GDI routines. One main benefit is the cut widths can be viewed from multiple angles rather than only face on as with GDI.

OpenGL mode is now enabled by default. If any problems are experienced with OpenGL, legacy GDI support can be enabled. In Tools - Options, under the Display group, there is an option DisplayMode which can be set to GDI or OpenGL. Changing this option will require restarting CamBam.

Edit - Polyline - Arc Fit.

Arc fitting routines were added to help with the new 3D profiling routines, but can also be used directly to help with machining complex polylines.

Select shapes, then slect the Edit - Polyline - Arc Fit menu option to attempt arc reduction on those shapes. The source polylines will be replaced with arc reduced versions.

The arc fit routines prompt for a fitting tolerance. This is the maximum allowed error in drawing units when attempting to fit curves to existing polyline segments.

Edit - Polyline - Remove Overlaps.

This function was added to help cope with problematic geometry, often caused by bitmap vectorizing software, that resulted in extra polyline segments overlapping existing ones.

This routine will also help remove instances where entire geomtry is duplicated.

To use this feature, it is a good idea to first create a new drawing layer and make it active. Select shapes to clean then select Edit - Polyline - Remove Overlaps. The new (cleaned) shapes will be inserted into the new active layer.

Toolpath changes

The FastPlungeHeight behaviour was added to a couple more places in the post processor.

This should allow for faster toolpath run times but care should be taken with this early release as this new behaviour has not been well tested.

Cross over moves now use the plunge feedrate setting of machining operations. Cross over moves are small feed moves from one toolpath to the start of another, where the distance to travel is within a threshold set in the MaxCrossoverDistance property of each machining operation. Distances greater than this will result in a retract to the clearance plane, rapid to new position then plunge.

Draw - Fill Region

Region fillers are another development added to support the new 3D profiling routines and useful in other applications.

Region fillers are used to fill a shape with lines according to certain patterns. The lines can the be used to form tool paths (as with 3D profile waterline roughing).

Once the technique has been proved with waterline roughing, the intention is to change the existing 2D pocketing operations to use these routines.

The current region filling styles are:

• Inside Offsets region filled with offsets from islands radiating outward.
• Outside Offsets region filled with progressive offsets from outside in (like current pocket method).
• Inside + Outside Offsets region filled with progressive offsets from outside in, unioned with offsets from islands radiating outward.
• Horizontal Hatch region filled with horizontal lines
• Vertical Hatch region filled with vertical lines

Machining - RebuildToolpathBeforePost

Changing this option to Prompt gives the ability to create g-code file without the routines automatically rebuilding toolpaths.

This is especially useful with 3D profiles or other complicated operations which may take many minutes to generate a toolpath, only to having to generate it again when g-code is created.

Other new features:

• Polyline join has been rewritten and number of improvemnets made.
• Surface join has been rewritten and now checks for common vertices.
• Can now Explode surfaces to individual faces.
• Can now trim point lists.
• New Transform - Scale operation to scale selected objects to a specific size.
• Can now change GCodeOriginOffset by clicking the [...] button to the right of the property and selecting a drawing point.
• Machining operation'a source shapes can now be editted from a list of IDs in the property grid and can be selected from the drawing using the [...] button to the right of the property.

Bug Fixes

• Canned cycle drilling operations now reset a number of parameters at the start of a block. This was resulting in potential missing modal parameters such as Z and R.
• Exporting to DXF now applies transformations to objects first.
• Bug fixed when bottom toolpath was overcutting holding tabs when lead ins used and depth increment evenly divided the target depth.
• Added sanity check when spiral drill hole diameter was <= tool diameter.
• Added sanity check when attempting to pocket open polylines.
• Number or bug fixes and rewrites relating to polyline offset generation which should hopefully improve toolpath generation reliability.

• Remove extra spline frame vertices from DXF files with traced polylines.
• More toolpath fixes
• Fixed bug with hatching region fillers.
• Now should recalculte holding tabs when source objects are rotated.
• Back plotting files with drilling canned cycles fixed in OpenGL mode
• Fixed bug in new Arc Fit routines that was causing cumulative errors on polylines with many tiny segments.
• Made extra degenerate tests on by default for all 3D Profiles as was safer and didn't impact performance much.
• Fixed bug when multiple surfaces selected when using BoundaryMethod=SelectedShapes

• Reduced 3D scanline trimming boundary.
• Fixed boundary calculations for Mold and Backface 3D operations.
• Fixed bugs relating to closed polylines with 2 points.
• Fixed bugs with vertical hatch fill.

• Fixed toolpath bug with certain C shaped objects.

Revision E bug fixes

• Fixed problems with About dialog on some OpenGL versions.
• Polyline - Arc Fit now replaces source polylines.
• Scale - Undo now working.