Laser cutter 'nesting'

[David Pye]

Hi,

Thought this might be of interest to many laser-cutter people - it is on hackaday today.

http://svgnest.com/

It's a web-based open source tool for tesselating SVG objects into the smallest possible area, which for laser cutting means faster cutting (ie less moving between objects on the bed) and more economical use of materials.

I'm going to give it a try for the next complex thing I make.

David

[Dan Nixon]

Ohh, looks cool, I've been looking for a nice tool for things like this before.

I can't quite work out what the stopping criteria are though, it seems to continue running the GA long after it converges (at least the best solution does not change).

One thing to be aware of, make sure you configure it such that the fitness function has a higher curve resolution than your drawing or you will end up with intersecting shapes.

Dan

[Alistair MacDonald]

I spotted that this morning and decided it was the best thing ever. Then I remembered I also like to minimise cutting by sharing cuts between shapes and I am not certain if it is so good at that. It is something I need to play with though. I am contemplating a larger ninja chess set.

  Alistair

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[Jon Davies]

That looks like a nice time saver :)

Sam Barlow needs to discover this...

[TonyD]

Well spotted David & Alistair

It's a shame it doesn't directly import dxf files. It looks like I'm going to have to import my dxf into inkscape and save them as svg but why I'm I complaining its a free on-line tool

Tony

[Gregory Marler]

On Friday, 22 January 2016 15:47:12 UTC, Dan Nixon wrote:

I can't quite work out what the stopping criteria are though, it seems to continue running the GA long after it converges (at least the best solution does not change).

Perhaps it never stops. I forgot I left the demo open just now, and it had got to over 400 iterations. 

[Dan Nixon]

It doesn't. I had a look through the code and found this.

Also the "material use" percentage is next to useless as it is simply the sum of areas of each polygon over the total material area, so regardless of the solution this stays constant.

Writing a genetic algorithm without stopping criteria of any sort is pretty damn stupid though.

Dan