Hi there, do you know if it’s possible to digitize patterns with estlcam and our Cnc’s?
Do you know any programs that I could use to digitize a large sawing parttern with my LR4?
KR
Giorgio
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Sorry, I don’t get what you are trying to do. What should the output be?
@Giorgione , can you provide some more details please.
What is the “sawing pattern” you want to digitize? (a picture may help)
What do you want to do with the digitized “pattern”?
We’re here to help, we’re just not sure yet what you are trying to accomplish.
Hey @Giorgione, have seen people like @marvinlange have success using a camera and lightburn to digitize patterns that they then laser/routed. This is Marvin’s setup back in 2022, maybe has been updated since?
Jamie did some work along these lines too, already seen this topic ?
I haven’t checked, but, the folks who made LightBurn are releasing MillMage and have shared Beta/RC versions that maybe able to help too?
Something like this:
minute 3:06
Manually jogging to capture and trace paths/profiles looks very time consuming.
Looking to digitize a Sawing pattern, or a sewing pattern template? What precision do you need?
I’ve seen photogrammetry based apps that let you take a bunch of photos close up, then the software stitches the photos together to produce relatively precise .SVG/.DXF or similar that can be used to do something with, like cut or laser
That seems like a really inefficient method. I’d have to see an example of what you’re trying to do. Even in their example, I would take a bunch of measurements and recreate it in CAD.
So it looks like you want to record a series of points along an existing object (pattern), and then use those points to create a 2D drawing that can be input into a CNC program (gcode).
Using the CNC to record the points looks like a very tedious manual process. If the pattern is mostly straight lines, it should be fairly straightforward, as you only need to record the endpoints of each straight segment, but if there are a lot of curves, the process becomes more tricky. It is possible to create spline curves in CAD programs like Fusion or FreeCAD with only a few points, but the results may not be very precise. The more points that define a curve, the more precise the spline will be compared to the original (but it will also require a ton more processing and calculating, which can create other issues).
I’m not sure of any way to record the individual points from the CNC, other than tracing the pattern using manual moves, then manually recording the points in a notebook or on a spreadsheet, and then manually entering those coordinates into a sketch in your CAD program. Seems pretty labor intensive, but depending on what you are tracing, and how many items you want to cut from the resulting gcode file, it may (or may not) be worth it.
Maybe there is something else out there that will do what you are trying to attempt, but personally I don’t know of anything. But I’m not very up to speed on the entire CNC universe, so you never know…