Bcnc .exe

[FatNarval]

Hi, I am following recent development of bcnc, and I am very thrilled with new features and passion you guys put in this project! Being inspired with this little mighty grbl , I have developed series of hobby grade cnc machines. Everything started when I wanted to make cnc for my nephew's 18th birthday.

Being sweeptaway with performance of simple but efficient combination of grbl and T slot construction, I was contemplating to make cnc fabric plotter cutter digitizer using simmilar approach.

The problem was software, bcnc looked promising, and recent development of digitizer encouraged me to build this big ploter cutter digitizer.

The problem is I still do not use bcnc, I use separate cam app, and use to export work coordinates g54 to g59so I save 6 points at the time, and manipulate text to create g code or hpgl files which I can later import as vectors or modify . I would like to test new features of bcnc but I am no programer, so some simple instalation with .exe file like in issue #437 would be rather helpful.

Best regards!

[Harvie]

First thing i have to say is that i am going to close this issue, because as you say. It's duplicate of #437 Any further discussion regarding .exe certainly should take place in that issue. Anyway i haven't used Windows myself for years, so i don't know much about this. It sounds doable, but i hope that some windows user will be able to do this for us. However it shouldn't be too hard to install bCNC on windows. If you got some older version working, you probably only need to install numpy to get latest version working as well.

Secondly your photos are inspiring. I am always happy to see photos of real machines running our software and parts made using it :-) Second machine looks very big. Are you going to create clothes on that machine? What kind of tool you use for cutting? I recently added dragknife support and it seems pretty stable to me.

What CAM do you use and what CAM features are most important to you?

If you are into this stuff, you might also like to google terms "diy cnc embroidery machine". It's just CNC controlled frame, which moves in sewing machine:

[FatNarval]

Thanks, sorry for double posting I am a little bit new around here :) Working area of fabric cutter is 1300x6000mm Yes, it will cut tarpaulins, pvc coated fabric . Yes I am using cheap drag knife for vinyl dhesive films, it can cut even thicker materials like this pvc fabric 900g/m2 0.8mm thick no problem. It has rather small offset 0.25 to 0.5mm. For regular fabric it will be used only as a plotter. For cutting uncoated fabric, 4th axis with tangential knife is a must. But, ide of drag knife with rolling blade seems very appealing. ( some problems that can anticipate are that cuting point, and offset can varry during cutting due round nature of knife combined with bumps, uneven thickness etc) but still worth exploring!

Regarding cam software, since I have industry grade 8x4 cnc router I am used to using Vectric Aspire. It has many features and I use almost all of them like 3d, Vcarving, 2d contouring and pocketing and drag knife too. Things that Aspire is lacking comes when you need to mill dificult materials like steel even aluminium, you know machine can do it but software does not allow it, it realy lacks adaptive or torchoidal milling strategies, even standard strategies of pocketing or 3d are not optimised as it could in some cases.

What options makes good cam software? Somethimes it is just some little things that others do not have like digitizer, drag knife, torchoidal milling, maybe V carving, litophane, halftone and texture generators with V or round bits and whish list goes on . Or othervise, basic things should work flawlesly like contouring, 3d and especialy pocketing can be realy tricky to make it work perfectly.

One imortant feature to me that I forogot to mention is ability to run gcode from any chosen line, at least I did not find that in any grbl controler so far.

Another thing that draws me to bcnc is as it can (did not try it yet) work without pc, with RPi, simmilar to my big cnc whic uses standalone dsp controler.

Regarding embroidery machines, I am realy in to, I am cooperating on development of one big industrial quilting machine. One of issues of such machines is needle control, especialy if it is embroidery machine. There are some developmnets, like this https://www.cnczone.com/forums/cnc-wood-router-project-log/57404-cam-software-10.html but it still depends from expenisive original software to generate required file. Bcnc driller seems like interesting approach to this problem. :)

[Harvie]

3d, Vcarving, torchoidal milling, ability to run gcode from any chosen line

These are the things that we don't have right now. Except for some very experimental alpha trochoidal support. All of them can be done with relative ease, but it will take some time. V-carving is cool, but i was thinking that there will be no one to implement it. But while i was working on trochoidal strategy and profile overcut code i realized that it can be solved using the same code. Since trochoids have variable diameter in the corners, which is same to the way how v-bit changes it's diameter by retracting in these corners. So it's possible that we'll get trochoid cornering and v-carving in single effort if we do this right.

[FatNarval]

Wow, that would be great, yes v carve seems to me that can be tricky, since all 3 axes work simultaneosly to produce desired effect. I do not know how else to help, but I will be more than hapyy to do testing. :)

[Harvie]

There is now much easier way of installing bCNC on Windows: https://github.com/vlachoudis/bCNC/issues/964#issuecomment-440315914