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tmpvar / gcode-simulator

convert svg to gcode and watch a virtual cnc machine make cuts in 3d
http://tmpvar.com/project/gcode-simulator/
MIT License
72 stars 10 forks source link

Always throws an error when run. #2

Open em opened 10 years ago

em commented 10 years ago 
$ gcode-simulator

events.js:72
        throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
              ^
Error: spawn ENOENT
    at errnoException (child_process.js:980:11)
    at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (child_process.js:771:34)

IIRC, it used to spin up a server and shell out to open, then you replaced with node-chrome which I've never gotten to work on OSX.

Personally, I'd much prefer the simpler approach for it to just spin up a server and let me access it in a browser. node-chrome seems to add a lot of complication and the end result is not very nice at all.

What would be really cool, is if it simply opened a named fifo pipe at, say, /tmp/gcode. That way I could run it once, and regularly stream gcode to test to the pipe, then focus a browser window I keep open.

tmpvar commented 10 years ago

oh, woops. Wasn't sure if anyone used this! You don't have to use the bin script, you can just open the index.html in the browser :)

I do agree though. node-chrome is not the answer to this "problem".

I love the idea of providing a pipe to push gcode into.

em commented 10 years ago

Haha. I think we have a lot of the same ideas on how machining could be done and want to bring a mix of unix philosophy and the discipline we subject ourselves to in web development to the stage. I love what you've done.

Stuff like solidworks is amazing, a marvel of every form of applied sciences, but the UX is so bad that it takes hours of fiddling if all you want to do is cut some text. I guess the reason for this is that most of this stuff doesn't matter in mass production which is what has fueled the development of the tools to date, but I'm really interested in rapid prototyping, so I want to build tools that take as little time as necessary to do one-off simple stuff.

Check out https://github.com/em/gcanvas

I also hooked it up to canvg and made a project similar to your svgmill: https://github.com/em/svg2gcode

Hope you are still interested in this stuff and want to keep working on it! : )

tmpvar commented 10 years ago

Stuff like solidworks is amazing, a marvel of every form of applied sciences, but the UX is so bad that it takes hours of fiddling if all you want to do is cut some text.

I've found that HSMExpress is pretty good to use once you get used to it.

Check out https://github.com/em/gcanvas

I actually saw this on twitter when you published it to npm. looks really cool!

I am definitely interested in this stuff! I'm currently down in the toolwidth compensation rabbit hole which should start yielding some valuable results shortly.

em commented 10 years ago

I've been meaning to try HSMExpress! I actually found a lot of the best information on toolpath strategies and speed/feed calculation from their docs. Still windows only though, as with everything.