Contour toolpath chopped into small pieces

[jari.peltola]

I have a small part (20mm wide, 2mm high) with 60 degr slope in one end. I used Contour to cut it with 0.3mm radius bull nose tool and 0.1mm stepdown. Basically should create 20 cutting steps and well under 100 lines. With tolerance and smoothing of 0.02mm the result is 600 lines (View Toolpath). Quite alot. But looking closer the toolpath there are 9 transition moves each having 43 lines for distance of 3.8mm. With 2000mm/min cutting speed it makes abt 380 commands /second. At least my small machine has troubles handling this.

Tuning tolerance and smoothing values the linecount can be made some what smaller.

I can understand that cutting moves are cut in small segments in tight places but transition, what's the point to chop up transition moves?

Attached is my example design.

[engineguy]

@jari.peltola 

Looking at your file I don`t see any transition "tuning", just setting it to "Shortest Path", should cut your amount of lines by about 50%, and "Straight Line" will reduce even further, and as you already know you can reduce that even more  by "tuning" the tolerance and smoothing values and other "tweaking", reckon you can get down to around 30% of what you had before  🙂 🙂 🙂

Hope that helps a little.

Regards

Rob

[jari.peltola]

Thanks, learning every day!

I managed to get the line count just under 200 which is abt. 1/3 of the "default". Surpringly decreasing tolerance from 0.2 -> 0.02 decreased linecount from 270 to 192, almost 30% down. Mostly because some of linear movements where converted to circular.

Br. Jari

[engineguy]

@jari.peltola 

Glad you are nearer, one thing you do need to look at is the "look ahead" setting/parameter in your control software, if you can set this to a higher value then the control will better handle the speed the control needs to be reading the code.

Regards

Rob