I’ve got to do some cutting for a four-motor sled and have a lot of scrap pieces of plywood with lots of parts cut from them. It’s a pain to pull them out and measure the uncut areas to see if I can use them, so I came up with a way to manage my boards and incorporate it into webcontrol. It’s part of the holey webcontrol branch that I will build and push tonight but it seems to work well, so I will be pushing it the main branch very soon.
How it works
You can create a rectangular board (sorry, no odd shapes) and specify its width, height, thickness, where its placed on the frame, and give it an ID and description of the material. Here is an example of a 48-inch x 24-inch x 0.75-inch piece of MDF centered on the frame I've labeled as "A-1".
You can position it by either entering the coordinates of the center of the board or by telling webcontrol to use the location of the router (red reticle) as the reference point.
In this example, I press “Top Right” to align the top right of the board with the router’s current position.
So that’s all well and good for positioning the board where you want it. The fun part comes in when you finish doing some cutting (note, I moved it back to center for this example). Here’s with the gcode loaded:
Now, after I cut the pieces out, I want to keep track of the areas I cut. So I select “Process GCode” from the board menu and it logs the areas that have been cut. To keep things simple and not carry around tons and tons of data, the cut data are based on 1-inch grids (I’m working on the graphic display to get the yellow squares to represent better.)
Now, I need to cut more pieces and load a different gcode…
That won’t work, so I move my home position to get the gcode in a clear space…
After I’m done cutting, I process the gcode…
I then save the board to the sd card and can load it later with all the cut data intact. When I need to cut something new, I just use webcontrol to look at the boards thereby avoiding digging into the wood pile with my tape measure.
The only thing it doesn’t do at the moment (and may not do even in the future) is let you resize the board and retain the cut data. That gets a bit tricky to program and not sure it’s worth the effort.
