Adding Dragknife Support to The CAM side of Fusion 360

[Anonymous]

Good afternoon,

     The following is a suggestion that I believe many people would benefit from if it were implemented into Fusion 360. That suggestion is to add dragknife tool support to the CAM side of Fusion 360. Numerous people  and companies use this tool to cut corrugated materials on CNC routers. In the POP ( Point of Purchase ) display industry, having a program that can create toolpaths for a dragknife is indispensable and necessary for prototypes and their subsequent revisions. Currently, the company I work for is using Vectric Aspire as the program to handle this task, but I am quite convinced that if Fusion 360 were to integrate support for the tool, my company, as well as many others, would not think twice about integrating it's workflow into Fusion. 

If you do not know what a dragknife is or how it is used in cutting corrugated displays here is a simplified view of it:

Basically you have 2d vectors display on your screen. The program then creates a G-code to trace the the vectors and create a toolpath for the Dragknife to follow. To make sharp corners happen, swivels are added in automatically for the knife to cut a corner correctly. Creases are the same thing, except that the z-axis is raised a little to not cut through the material, thus creating a cut score. This simple task of being able to tell a CNC machine where to cut and where to crease, paves a way for corrugated designers, such as myself, to bring ideas to life. 

So I now come to the begging stage of this letter. Please please please oh please add support for this! This is the only thing holding me back from fully integrating into the Fusion 360 workflow. I do not know how complicated it would be to program this in, but surely being able to tell a CNC machine to simply follow a line and raise the blade for creases can't be too too hard. Please Autodesk, consider my suggestion! For the common good of not only me, but of all corrugated designers interested in Fusion.

Thank you,

Jose

[WhiteRoomSkis]

After several months of development and testing we have finished a drag knife add-on for Fusion 360. This add-on creates support for the use of drag knives. Users will now have the ability to generate drag knife specific tool paths from within Fusion 360 after installing the add- on.
Features include the ability to specify swivel height, blade offset and corner tolerance angle. The Drag Knife add-on also supports multiple depth passes. The drag knife add-on is compatible with both OSx and PC versions of Fusion 360.The add-on comes with comprehensive documentation as well as a video to assist users in their workflow.
The Drag Knife add on can be downloaded from the Fusion 360 App store.
(https://apps.autodesk.com/FUSION/en/Home/Index)
It is recommended that users also download and install the free NC Viewer add-on from the Fusion 360 App Store or use the online version which can be found at https://ncviewer.com .

[macmanpb]

DragKnife Version 1.0.2 is available