Getting complex 2D shapes to the shopbot

Hi everyone,

Sorry if this has been talked about before, but there seems to be so much info and I'm not really sure what applies to me. I use my shopbot mainly for speaker cabinets. To date, I do all my programming in a text file. Just moving in straight lines, the basic CR, CC, CA, etc do just about everything I need.

Now I am getting into a few cabinets that will have many multiple rings or shapes cutout and stacked to form the cabinet. The basic shape will be similar to a letter D. I need a way to create this shape and then resize it to many different sizes. When stacked these pieces will make somewhat of an egg shape.

I also have many requests for things like reindeer , snowmen, and things like that around the holiday season. I would like to be able to scan in the plans you can buy at the woodworking stores, or take some .gif images of santa and then have a way to cut these. I just need to make a path for cutting the entire shape. Then I figure I can just use a standard spiral upcut bit and do passes at 2 or 3 depths to cut it all out. Basically the same that I do now.

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of money to spend on something that can do this. Does anyone have suggestions for a low cost method to go from at 2D gif file to a 2d cutting file?

John

John,
You NEED to invest in some type of CAD program. I would recommend TurboCAD or BobCAD because they are cheap and easy to use...but ANY CAD program will do. CorelDraw is another option since you can also export as a DXF. Once you have a CAD program you can pull in a picture, trace over it and then export the design as a DXF. I am assuming that you don't have PartWizard. If you did, you could easily import a DXF file, scale it and make toolpaths in the same program. It is very easy to use. I'm no Corel expert but I believe that you can also scale your design up or down also.

Once you've scaled your drawing and exported it as a DXF you can use the ShopBot DXF to SBP converter to generate a toolpath.

I was shocked when I read that you are coding all of this by hand...there are MUCH easier ways...

E-mail me if you need help.

-Brady

Well, I do have Autocad 2000 to work with. I really don't know it well at all though. What I am more interested in right now is taking some Christmas clipart and cutting shapes out of plywood to paint. Reindeer for the yard, santa sleigh, etc etc. I can edit the images nicely in Photoshop then use WinTopo that someone suggested to convert to vector data and save the .dxf.

From that point on I don't have a clue how to get the .dxf to a format I can cut.

John

John, There is a file that comes with the shopbot to convert a dxf file to a shopbot file. The file name in your sb200 directory is ux_dxf.exe. It is very simple to use.

Joe

Thanks Joe,

I am still having some trouble gettign the vector data exactly how I want it. The lines seem to have some spaces in them, and in some spots just don't go where I want them to.

The help file for the newest shopbot control also says that vector paths are typically saved in the order they are drawn.

Is there any vector drawing program where I can simply scan in an image, then trace over it by hand like I could in photoshop, creating the vector data? Everything I can find seems to just want to convert my .bmp to vector data, but then doesn't allow me to edit it at all.

John

I played around a little more. I cleaned up the .gif image in Photoshop to have just some nice dark lines. Converted to vector data in WinTopo. The only thing now is that I need to be able to round some corners a little and connect a few spots that didn't quite connect. I also have 2 seperate paths I need to create. One is to cut outlines on the image, the other is to cut all the way through around the outside.

I also got the TurboCAD Learning Edition. I can import the vector data into it, but I am having trouble editing it and converting to seperate layers. Anyone know of a good tutorial for TurboCAD?

John

John. You could try; www.itug.com, it's the international Turbocad user's group Forum. LOT'S of help there... Bill P.

John.

I was working a lot in AutCad, and I fill that the Raster-Vectors convertes don't work well, whenever if your problem is edit a polyline, you must to use the comand PE, select the polyline, if is not a a polyline you can canvert at this time, next select the option Join (only type J [ENTER]) and select all the entities you like to join, note that only can join the lines, arcs, polylines that are conected at the end points.

If after you like to create a DXF file, you can use the command DXFOUT, asign the name file, but you must to select the Autocad version 12 becouse that is the version that SB read fine.

If you have a custion you can send me a mail at
alexguttaf@juno.com

Sorry my poor English