Engrave Improvements?

[LibertyMachine]

@al.whatmough @jeff.pek

Is there any possibility that we are going to see much needed improvements in the area of Engrave? 

"But, But.. We already have Engrave and look at all that v-carve we can do!"

Yeah, you know what I'm getting at and you KNOW that's not the answer. I need to simply machine engrave an incrementing serial number on a bunch of parts and it needs to look stellar under 20x magnification (customer request). Simply following a centerline at a constant Z depth is the way to go. None of this V-carve BS. That is what the machinists are looking for; quick and simple text engrave following a centerline and no varying Z heights.

I've watched the video in this reply, and I'm sorry, but I don't think the answer is to continue doing things the way that's shown. Can you imagine having to manually offset the centerline for dozens of texts with a S/N stretching out 16 digits?

And on top of that; the sizing and positioning of text could use some improvement. A .120" defined height does not necessarily yield that in actuality, depending on what font you are using.

Comments, thoughts, ideas?

[Lonnie.Cady]

@LibertyMachine

Does your control have any engraving options?

My fanuc has G510 I think for engraving and another option IIRC.  How do you plan to do your serial numbers?  post process every time??

On a different note  HSMWorks has it nailed down IMO.

[LibertyMachine]

Sadly, my Mori does not have an engraving option.

In this instance, the serial numbers are not incrementing, I threw that out as an example. But, it is still a 14 digit P/N that needs to look top notch, which you won't get with a standard 90 deg engraver unless you are limiting the Z axis

I'm going to try to see what I can get out of Inventor, perhaps there are better options over there

[CGPM]

I would love to hear a good answer to this as I am doing more and more  PRODUCTION engraving, and V carve does not work for this. 

[LibertyMachine]

Realistically, in the short term, all we really need is a single-stroke font that we can use Trace with. So, rather than inventing a whole new tool path option, if we just had a single line font that we could explode and use Trace with, that would get most of us 90% of the way there, I would think.

I'd still like to hear what Autodesk has to say

[Lonnie.Cady]

I would also vote for some improvements to engrave.  The single stroke font with trace or contour works great, but I don't want to explode text.  I want it to remain editable, I want to be able to set size, spacing, justify(right left center) and follow a curve for round parts.

[LibertyMachine]

That's even better, as right now it's horse manure what steps you have to go through to make sure your text is perfectly centered on a part and the scale is correct

[ivan.stanojevic]

Hi @LibertyMachine,

There is a Engrave Text Add-in for Inventor, and it does a single line text which you can use in Trace operation.

If you are interested I can send you this add-in. Pm me with your email address.

[daniel_lyall]

You're not wrong seth, depth control is needed, if they gave us that this sort of post would not happen, why it will be a engrave/Vcarve. not a toolpath named engrave that does Vcarve.

If you wont I can help with the text with a different program I have that has a stick font, I can send it to you as a .DXF.

[LibertyMachine]

Sorry Daniel, I wasn't ignoring your offer. I never received email updates showing new responses to my threads. It's a problem that's been plaguing some people as of late.

Thanks for the offer, but the add-in from @ivan.stanojevic did the trick. It would be nice if something similar existed for Fusion. (hint hint Autodesk team  )

The radio silence is disappointing. I mean, even a simple "Yes, we are aware of it's shortcoming and we are discussing how to improve" would be better than hearing nothing. Hearing nothing suggests that the issue is...not an issue

[daniel_lyall]

Yep thats a pain, I just jump on the HSM forum to get the notifications they need to add it here.

I would off just let you do it your self on my computer, remote computers are quite handy at times.

They wont fusion to be the makers program text is one thing they need to improve, it gets annoying have to use multiple programs. 

[Anonymous]

AD should do it for no other reason than the amount of time and help given by Daniel and Seth in the forum. Their Quick and thorough responses to all things F360 have been one of your most killer features. 

[ovisopa]

I never had to do any engraving on the new mill, but on the router every part has an article number / name, quite long so I did thousands of engravings there, but it's quite simple if I use Cambam Single stroke fonts in CamBam.

I just tried now with Fusion and I don't know why it selected only a few parts of the letters. Do I need to extrude the font to be engraved ? Can't I just select the text and engrave it ? 

The Engrave operation failed completely with an Internal CAM  kernel error.

The trace operation did something, but it's weird that the letters are not completely selected, I tried using ALT, but no help.

What I can do to be able to select the entire text ?

GeorgeRace Stick fonts download

 The same font in Cambam

[LibertyMachine]

To engrave simple text in Fusion:

In Model mode, create the text. Before exiting the Sketch, right click on the text and select "Explode Text"

You should than be able to engrave the text in CAM mode

[daniel_lyall]

Fusion can not do stick font at the moment with engrave, engrave needs a never ending path to be able to work in all reality it's Vcarve.

Traces should be able to do the job, I will have a look at your file. And of course I don't have that font so it failed, what @LibertyMachine said should work

@Anonymous Thank you 

[ivan.stanojevic]

@ovisopa

I've regenerated trace operation and everything is looking good.

[ovisopa]

@ivan.stanojevic but that looks like a double line font, the engraving will not be too clean.

@LibertyMachine I did explode the text but it looks the same as it did the toolpaths, with missing elements. And now if I exploded I can't edit the text anymore, right ? 

 But I faced another problem, how I can select the exploded text all at once? I can't Click and drag the mouse, is there another trick to select everything in the Geometry tab ? And selecting every tiny segment, one at a time it's not an option.

It seems to me (maybe I'm wrong) that Fusion is very very poor in text handling, when I first tried it I couldn't believe there is no way to import the text from an DXF file, this also seems to me a very weird for a software like this, I mean all the other cheaper or free software handled the texts in the dxf file just fine, and such an advanced software has problems handling/importing text.

[ovisopa]

@daniel_lyall the font I use was 1CamBam_Stick_3 .. you can find  it in the link I posted above

http://www.atelier-des-fougeres.fr/Cambam/Aide/Plugins/stickfonts.html

[porsbym]

Hi guys, thanks for the input here and apologies for the lack of communication.

We are, however, aware that the general area of "text" in CAM is not covered sufficiently, and I believe that there are basically three approaches to improving the situation:

1. Improve text capabilities in the CAD systems - specifically supporting single line "stick" fonts. This is something we're continuing to push for and some improvements have made it into recent Inventor versions.
2. Improve Engrave (aka V-carve) to support multiple depths and depth limits. We do have Engrave improvements planned but not as a top priority at the moment.
3. Add CAM-specific Text functionality to cover the most typical workflows directly (like adding a serial number etc.) I imagine this would be a new operation type called "Text", and I think it would actually create the best workflow for the typical CAM "text" workflows.

I don't believe that any of these address all text related use cases, and so ultimately will need all three. The three approaches are independent, though, so depending on your feedback we can prioritize one over the others.

To add a little bit more detail about the "Text" strategy, here's how I would imagine it to look:

Text

Font: A predefined list of "stick" fonts

Size: Height in millimeters/inches

Select edge/line/face to align to

Select origin

Alignment: Left/Center/Right, Top/Middle/Bottom

Method: Trace, Project, Etch (using Cutting strategy), NC Comment/Manual NC, potentially others

 
Depending on which method is chosen, additional parameters would be shown as appropriate for selecting a tool, and controlling the strategy specific parameters (depth of cut, multiple passes etc).
It would also be possible to have the strategy output to something like a label printer, and the setup sheet would indicate placement etc.

Please, let me know your thoughts on this? In particular, would this proposed Text operation cover most of your needs, and in what cases would you prefer solution 1 or 2 instead?

/Mark

[LibertyMachine]

Option #3 is most attractive, and yes, it would cover all uses, for my situation.

Text

Font: A predefined list of "stick" fonts       Stick fonts are ok, but in times past, that usually meant a "0" was shaped like an octagon. Would it be feasible to actually have arcs where possible?

Size: Height in millimeters/inches     This would need to be to centerline of the engraving, and not some arbitrary box as what we have with the current "Text" option in Model Space.

Select edge/line/face to align to      We would need the ability to reposition the engraving if it doesn't appear aesthetically pleasing 

Select origin

Alignment: Left/Center/Right, Top/Middle/Bottom         Yes, this is great, but also please consider wrapping around a center point. Not in 3d space (although that would be sweet), but more like numbers on a clock or an award/trophy. If circular text is allowed, consider allowing the orientation so they are all aligned horizontally or perpindicular to the center point

Method: Trace, Project, Etch (using Cutting strategy), NC Comment/Manual NC, potentially others   Something along the lines of Trace would be sufficient. However, and this is very important: Feedrates. We may be able to cut at a fair feedrate when engraving, but it's been my experience that the Plunge needs to be gentle. However, the current method of linking moves and retract settings doesn't make (that I've found) for a clean method of Feed to a .254mm above the part and a gentle feed to depth. Yes, we can play with clearance planes, but that's a bit more stressful just going full rapid to .25mm above the part (clearance is clearance, amiright?)

And I say "we". I don't claim to speak for anyone else, but I sound selfish when I just type "I"