Fusion
Relatively new to 3D modeling and CAD and CAM.
I want to laser cut parts and etch their part numbers on each. My design is composed of several hundreds of parts, so correctly labeling each one is capital. Each part is a component and is correctly named.
I used Nester to place my very numerous small parts on a stock of balsa or plywood. Then in the CAM module I can prepare the laser cutting operations, including the specific placement of tabs, for each part. So far, so good, but that's still only the cutting without labelling.
I found an etch mode for the laser operation, but I haven't found a way to select (location, angle, size, font) where to apply the part number on each part, similar to what is available for the tabs.
The only way I found is to manually label each part outside of Fusion (with DraftSight), in the DXF that the CAM module produced. This is not only painstaking, it is difficult to maintain when I have design changes, and when I want to produce several flavors of DXF files for different laser kerf/machines.
I've attached one of my designs, including the bare-cutting DXF that is currently output by the CAM module, and a final DXF I've made after all the manual post-processing I do in DraftSight to include the part numbers. Note that the labels are TEXT elements in the DXF that can be interpreted by the laser driver as an "engrave" operation. Ho one more thing : in the DXF the text needs to be on a different layer or color than the cutting.
