External control of SheetCAM from Visual Basic / VBA

New features
21

Take a look at sheetcam job templates.

  • Import a drawing with the layers your CAD will name them, the one(s) most commonly used.
  • setup your cutting Operations on those layer(s).
  • File-‘Save job as template’
  • close sheetcam
  • open sheetcam
  • File-‘Open job template’
  • you’ll get an error that the layer(s) do not exist, that’s fine.
  • Import a dxf using those layer names
  • boom- you have a job with cutting Operations ready to gen gcode.
22

Hi,

Thank you for the reply. I still have a question:
When you say, "Import a dxf using those layer names, " I think this would be a manual operation using the SheetCAM GUI.

How can I do that programmatically? Should the program open the job template and replace the part drawing the dxf file path?

Thank you.

23

@amigor51 - correct, I was referring to it being a manual action using sheetcam GUI to Import the dxf into the now loaded job template.

However, the job template once loaded does not have a ‘drawing’ to replace, rather it appears absent of the original drawing, but it retains the toolset, operations, and part name. The Imported dxf will eventually replace the part name if the dialogue is set to do so.

As for doing all of this programmatically, I’ll have to defer to @Les_Newell for that answer.

24

Thanks for the reply. @Les_Newell, can you please share your thoughts on achieving this? Or is there another way to generate a job for a drawing programmatically and later the g-code without depending on the SheetCAM user interface?

Thanks!