Woke up in the middle of the night last night with this idea in my head and for all I know its already in the works.
A way for the GF to identify the size and shape of the material and then feed the GF a large list of SVGs that need to be cut and have the GF fit as many on the material as possible and then once that sheet is used up the GF prompts you to put a new sheet in and it continues.
If you do this by uploading many SVG at the start, and inserting materials one at a time afterâŚ
This would require that the largest possible jobs to fit on the material be prioritized, since any future piece may be too small for that job. Since at every step you are optimizing for âget largest firstâ instead of âuse all materialâ this means that 100 jobs across 20 odds and ends pieces would wind up actually being rather inefficient.
So, if you want absolute optimization for material use, you would need to scan in all material and load all SVGs, run optimization nesting, then proceed to re-enter each piece that did have a cut assigned to it.
Even just the first method would be quite nice, since it could pack in some small parts here and there that the human eye may not have accounted for, and do rotations to fully optimize material consumption. The second option would be time and computation intense, but VERY nice.
Oh yeah. Some good points. I like the idea of being able to log multiple pieces of material and having it be able to figure out the best configuration!
If you were willing to accept some constraints (e.g. âif you leave off these pieces you can fit all the restâ) it would be pretty nice. Or with use youâd simply learn about the kind of job that tended to break the optimizer.
I would really want software like this to work with concavities and interior waste, because that frees you up for thinking about designs you wouldnât to otherwise. And computing cycles are probably something weâve got plenty of. (Someone who knows their way around GPUs could probably leverage clipping and collision detection routines to make this happen faster than we think.)
An added wrinkle would be designating which parts of a cut were keepers vs discards. Then smaller parts the would fit in an otherwise scrap remnant could be placed inside the discard cuts.
I just have ideas of all this extra automated packing ending up for me like taking 3 different jigsaw puzzles throwing them in one box and giving it a thorough shaking.
While weâre blue-skying, I vote for button mode, where any smallish circular/oval cutout thatâs not otherwise occupied gets engraved with something interesting.
@dan can a external inline air blower be attached to the hose? I feel this would greatly relieve the fumes and HEAT, from the glowforge to a window source. Nice to have and better if it were an option GF provided as a extra.
Thatâs great to hear. Canât wait until mine arrives. I have a nice little workshop all set up for itđ. Howâs production going anyways? Still on track with the shipment date?
I might have a solution to your heating issue. A little of my background I have 20 years refrigeration experience and license and certified 5 degrees for HVaC. My idea would be cheap and effective for a cooler system. Allowing the GF To operate in warmer climates. Basically allowing the system to always stay near 65 degrees.