Lisp CNC Milling Software

[Manuel Odendahl]

Hi people,

I'm new to this list and digital design / CNC milling as well. I got a
CNC mill end of december, and decided to write my own weird kind of
CAM software. I started documenting it over at my blog at http://ruinwesen.com/blog?id=387
, and will post some more stuff with more code and pictures and
videos in the next few days.

I'm really stoked about this whole thing, and I optimized my workflow.
Nice features I have in the software:

- milling of processing sketches. Write some code in processing, and
have it milled as 2d (no 3d yet). I quickly showed that to bre at
25c3, if he does remember :)

So for example this sketch: http://bl0rg.net/~manuel/lamp1.png

gets milled as:

http://bl0rg.net/~manuel/cube-4.jpg

- milling of casings, wooden prototypes and pcbs directly out of
Eagle. This allows me to have a single CAD tool for my electronic
devices, and allows me to mill frontplates, casings and wooden
prototypes (to see if everything fits) without having to use a
gazillion different CAD tools:

http://bl0rg.net/~manuel/holzproto.jpg
http://bl0rg.net/~manuel/holzproto2.jpg

- panelizing of parts (as in the cube above)

- tracing of bitmaps, and offseting / rasterizing curves.

Take this processing sketch: http://bl0rg.net/~manuel/abspack-crowd/

and mill it:

http://bl0rg.net/~manuel/monster-fraes.jpg
http://bl0rg.net/~manuel/monster-fraes2.jpg

or make boards for development kits out of it:

http://bl0rg.net/~manuel/brett.jpg

Use the bitmap code to mill out fonts and logos:

http://bl0rg.net/~manuel/brett2.jpg

I'm really happy about spending the time to do this intense maths and
geometry code thing, because I know have this incredibly tight
workflow that allows me to do unique casings and devices at almost the
same cost of doing a more chain-like workflow.

I'm in the process of cleaning up the code so that maybe other people
will get to use it :)

Regards, Manuel

[bre pettis]

Wow, you're rocking it! WOW! Awesome! So much to look at!

[Darryl Greensill]

That's really extraordinary, well done!

One of the major barriers to getting into CNC is the high cost of
commercial software - work like yours will make the process more
accessible to more people.

There are many interesting resources at www.cnc4free.org and
www.cnczone.com, which you might find useful, and your own work would
be of great interest to many people on cnczone as well. From what I've
seen of Processing, it particularly lends itself to creating unique
and different, organic-like, graphics, variations on a theme generated
from rules applied to starting conditions. Linking this easily to CNC
will give a vast array of uses: for example, making unique and
realistic vine carvings to wrap around picture frames, or generating
unique patterns to carve into the backs of mirror tiles to infill with
colored paint, each one guaranteed to be different, but enough alike
to "match".

Regards,
Darryl.

[Manuel Odendahl]

Hi Darryl,

On Feb 2, 2009, at 5:08 AM, Darryl Greensill wrote:
> One of the major barriers to getting into CNC is the high cost of
> commercial software - work like yours will make the process more
> accessible to more people.

Thanks for the kind words. I'm a bit unhappy about the software as it
is now as it's really a big pile of code only I can walk my way
through. I'm going to clean it up, but it being Common Lisp puts the
hurdle a bit high for someone who wants to "just try it out". I was
thinking of maybe trying to build a GUI and make a release version for
it, but seeing the amount of work that went into this, I'm not
entirely too sure about making it opensource (maybe I should though).

Also I'm really new at this whole CNC stuff, so I hope that people who
have more experience (which is basically everybody that used a CNC
mill) will be able to look at the blog postings and then maybe suggest
some things :) I'll blog a bit more about it in the next few days and
show a bit more of my process in doing things.

I think what I could do, and which I think is the most helpful aspect
of what I wrote, is to write a standalone java version of the basic
"movement" opcodes, and integrate them into processing, so that you
could save your sketch directly as g-code (at the moment it goes
processing -> lisp -> g-code).

Also the eagle -> lisp -> g-code is very useful, and I'll try to tear
that apart into its own package.

I implemented PDF export yesterday, so that I can now print out stuff
before milling it, one more step in rapid prototyping :)

Cheers, Manuel
>

[Manuel Odendahl]

Hi peepz,

On Feb 3, 2009, at 8:45 AM, Manuel Odendahl wrote:
> Also the eagle -> lisp -> g-code is very useful, and I'll try to tear
> that apart into its own package.

I put up the sourcecode I have until now on google code at http://code.google.com/p/cl-mill/
. It's not really something I'd wish onto anybody, but at least you
can take a peek and once I find the time (prolly end of march or so)
i'll try to make into something that other people can enjoy :)

Cheers, Manuel