Repeating operation along rectangular pattern - single WCS

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AD47
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Joined: Sun Jan 22, 2023 11:42 pm
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Repeating operation along rectangular pattern - single WCS

Post by AD47 »

Hi - First post here. Before asking for anyone's time/input I'd like to state how grateful and impressed I am with the Path WB so far. I have used Inventor CAD/CAM extensively (though not commercially), and I find it remarkable how much capability exists in Path. Very happy to have found this community. I plan to be a long time user/tester - looking forward to contributing!
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I have recently added a large CNC router to my shop. I will be using this to create many small parts in a single Job - on the order of 50+ (typically identical) parts or more per Job. To conserve modeling and computing effort (for instance, when there are complex 3D surfaces involved), I would like to be able to render a model/toolpaths for only one part, and then use some method to repeat the operation at a new location/fixture. Due to the number of parts, I am pretty sure I cannot just use a different WCS (G54, G55, etc...) for each fixture as is supported by the existing feature sliptonic detailed here: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?t=31852

I don't expect this to be incorporated, just thought I might document my use case here to see if others had any interest. Has anyone else needed similar capability or found an alternative approach?

So far, I am aware of a couple manual approaches:
-nesting routine, using M97 or M98 codes to call a program and offset repeatedly to create a grid of operation positions to correspond to each fixture
-repeatedly editing current WCS with G10 code to establish new fixture position
chrisb
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Re: Repeating operation along rectangular pattern - single WCS

Post by chrisb »

Hi and welcome to the forum!

This sounds to me like an application of Path Array.
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AD47
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Joined: Sun Jan 22, 2023 11:42 pm
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Re: Repeating operation along rectangular pattern - single WCS

Post by AD47 »

That sounds like the ticket! Can't believe I missed that - I'll try to look around more before asking next time. Thanks
chrisb
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Re: Repeating operation along rectangular pattern - single WCS

Post by chrisb »

AD47 wrote: Wed Jan 25, 2023 12:48 am That sounds like the ticket! Can't believe I missed that - I'll try to look around more before asking next time. Thanks
Glad it helped.
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