sheetcam.com

Hi, is there any way to force SheetCam to place starts point at the same file starts points, I played with the "Start point step size" and "Start point telerance clearance" parameters but with no success. Thank's

I'm sure there is some sort of method to how it places start points, but I sure haven't figured it out. I don't think there is any way to tell it where you want them. I always end up manually moving them around.

Thanks for your reply. It does not make sense to me, I mean that the easiest way to place these points for the SheetCam DXF parser would be taking the starting points of the shapes/vectors as the locations of the starting points, I do not know what kind of algorithm it use to place these points ..

When you load your drawing SheetCam tries to position the start points to minimize the travel between start points. It doesn't use the start points of the outlines in the drawing.

Sheetcam often seems to choose, IMO, the worse place to start. In the middle of corners vs an open area, etc.

For one-off items, you just have to adjust the start points prior to saving the job and cutting.

For repeat items, I set everything up how I want it, and save it as a part. Then, when I need to cut that item again, I open that part, and everything is set as I last used it.

This is one reason I wish Sheetcam had true part nesting. There are some nice macros for CorelDraw that do good nesting (eCut), but when you import a full nest material (say, a 48"x120" sheet of steel), you have to go in and manually adjust a bazillion start points. If Sheetcam handled start points in a more intelligent manner, the inexpensive external nesting options would negate much of the issue of sheetcam not having built-in part nesting.

Les,

would it be much work to add this as a new feature to Sheetcam, i.e. having a tickbox/option to enable using using the start/end points of the curves on the imported drawing as the start/pierce points in Sheetcam.

Indeed there have been many times when I could have used this feature. Nesting in 3rd party cad programs is often preferred for it's ease and flexibility yet as mentioned, having to go over all the pierce positions in Sheetcam can be a time consuming task.

Keith