Is there a way to warp a flat program onto an arbitrarily warped and tilted surface like Gcode ripper?

Mill
1

I recently used Gcode ripper on my Mach3 controlled CNC routers. It was very useful for engraving on the inside of a mold cavity.

Has anyone done something similar to that in PathPilot?

For Gcode ripper works for Mach3 and linuxCNC and something else. The Gcode ripper program reads in the Gcode file from your CAM post processor. You specify offsets between your probe and cutting tool, sampling array, probing feeds and clearances. You then process the file and it writes a new gcode file that probes the extents of the gcode program at the x and y sample array points. It writes a text file with the probe results. For very z position in the original gcode file is replaced with a z height calculation based on an interpolated value from the sampling grid.

This is really convenient and eliminates the need to accurately level or even have a planar surface to cut on.

I believe Mach4 has the capability in it’s interface to do the Gcode ripper functionality.

Thanks
Kirk

2

You could probe the surface and then bring that into fusion/solidworks/inventor and then model your job and make gcode. As far as i know there isnt a way to do this in conversational screens.

3

I have seen examples of point mapping a surface and then g code z values changed in reference to the point map. The program you mention is one of the few examples. A couple high end commercial large format router companies also claim to have this ability, but I could never find out if it was proprietary or if it was an off the shelf program. I know for large area programs on routers it would be a very useful program of feature to have. It can be done in cad cam as mentioned above but your working with a very fixed area and time consuming to model around that with my software anyway.

4

This is a commonly needed thing for PCB milling when you don’t have a vacuum fixture to hold the PCB flat. Something like this should be able to be implemented for LinuxCNC/Pathpilot: LinuxCNC Documentation Wiki: PCB Milling And Drilling With Cheap And Simple Height-Probing

5

The gcode ripper program has a linux CNC output. It seems to work like the link you attached.

For those programs the digitizing isn’t really treated as a different tool number than the cutter position

With Pathpilot, there is the offsets tab and a defined probe tool number.

Guess I will ask Tormach support directly if there is a way of doing the gcode ripper functionality.