I wasn’t really sure if I needed to spend the $$ on Sheetcam and I do most of my design stuff on my Mac but recently I did a drawing of a wolf up in Fusion with some arty intricate cuts and was having a heck of a time with getting some of the toolpaths to work. I decided it was worth my time (and money) to try Sheetcam so pulled out the credit card and went all in
Installed it on the laptop I use for Firecontrol and in no time at all I had some pesky open paths dealt with and had the wolf cut just fine. I like how Sheetcam deals with single line cuts and holes , not to mention finding open paths and I’m sure there’s a whole lot more i’ll find out as I go along.
I still really like Fusion for doing my dimesional drawing but I can see doing most of my post processing with Sheetcam from here on in. Had to wrap my head around the PC interface but it didn’t take much to get back in the groove.
Looks great. I just switched back to running parallels on my Mac. Their latest update made it run better. Now I can swipe back and forth from windows and OS X to run sheetcam.
FWIW, SheetCam will take care of all you plasma CAM needs! No matter the source. Process it on whatever CAD/Drawing program you want, but then output to SVG or DXF and SheetCam will let you easily tune it to your final product.
Disclaimer: I have no monetary or contractual interest in SheetCam. Damn!
One question I have (haven’t found the answer yet but haven’t looked too hard) is if I want to add some pauses can I do that in Sheetcam or do I have to do that directly in the gcode? I figure Sheetcam might do it for me somewhere.
You can do this in a couple of ways depending on WHEN you want the delay inserted.
First, if you want the delay after a shape is cut, you can simply modify the tool to add pause after cut. This will do this everywhere that tool is used and will add a pause after each completed operation.
The second, more flexible, but not obvious, way of doing things is to learn how to ‘insert code snippet’ as an operation. In the code you simply add the G-Code command “G4 Pxxx” where xxx is, hopefully, delay in milliseconds.
Search for SheetCam Insert Code Snippet for examples.
Thanks a bunch will track down where to add a pause in the tool as a first step.
My current 26 gal compressor and Miller 375 are a little lightweight but I don’t don’t use my table on many bigger projects so with a few pauses during a job I should be able to let things cool and catch up.
Just started looking into code snippets. Will do some experimenting. I’ve added pauses manually to some of my Fusion .NC files and figured you could do that within Sheetcam.
Code Snippets are pretty powerful as they allow you to put in all kinds of complexity into a job. For example, I use it to keep accumulating a Y offset when I do indexed cutting jobs. I put a snippet as the very first operation and use that to initialize some variables (offset amount and zero out the initial offset), then, after each segment, I put in a snippet that pauses the cutting so I can move the workpiece and updates the Y offset.
I also have a code snippet to pause cutting and move to a convenient location so I can switch nozzles in cases where I have two sets of details (like peck drills) in a job.
