Gcodetools Tutorial Part 1

okay here's a quick g-code tutorial using Inkscape and a neat extension called g-code tools if you do a search on google for g code tools you'll probably come up very quickly Eco tools the first link is this plug-in and here's where you can download it the tools are here you could unzip it even though I'm on Windows that can handle a GZ an ATAR I just use 7-zip and I put it in the right place it tells you how to install it I want to get to actually how you use it though once its installed here is Inkscape and forgive me american and we use inches a lot over here still so I have gone to document properties and I've set my default units to be inches but all this works with millimeters if that's what you like to use it's really not a big deal I've also set my boundary my width and height of my page in Inkscape to a custom size that represents the addressable area that my engraver can hit I've kind of a small engraver that I'm using for small things so that's keeps me that border there we'll change to those units or to those sizes as soon as you type them in kind of keeps you honest make sure you're inside and gives you an idea of scale as well alright so actually let's get started also by the way under extensions g-code tools that's where you'll find it I'll be going here a lot over the course of this tutorial and you'll see ok so let's say I want to draw a rectangle this is not an Inkscape tutorial by the way there's plenty of Inkscape tutorials telling you how to draw shapes and so forth I'm just gonna assume you know how to draw circles and squares and so forth here's a square why do I lock it down to a specific shape I'll make it door size 2 inches by 2 inches and there we go okay with those rounded corners they look good so that's a good start and what I'm going to do next is let's make some text I'll click here the font and my name's mats and let's put em in there you get a little bit bigger and let's make it a more interesting font no that's fine sure okay I'll hit close so let's use this as a starting point let's say you want to engrave this you want this to be engraved as well as the M itself well the path here is no problem there's really not much to do with that but the M is a is a font we have to turn that into paths well luckily the g-code tools takes advantage of a need of the offset tool built into Inkscape to make this not too difficult but before I do that I need to set some ground rules for how gqo tools is supposed to work I'm gonna go to extension so I'm gonna go to g-code tools the first thing I do is I do orientation points I click on that I don't know what these other things do these other options but I keep this here as such and here's where you set where the beginning of your surfaces the zero point where does your surface that you're engraving start on your z-axis and then how far down into a total are you going to go you might have to take several steps to get there we'll cover that in a minute but the ultimate depth will be right there and gained your inches your units here I'll hit apply and it just throws down those two coordinates notice the depth down here first of all zero zero zero and five zero zero this five does line up with the five on the axis so it's that's that location but there's your depth of six to five and negative is conventional what you usually drop down to so and that's why my machine works so I'm gonna leave it like that you could if you wanted to if you wanted to change the depth so say 75,000 75,000 you could do that no problem so we've done our orientation next thing we're gonna do is go to G code tools and then also go to tools library we're gonna associate a tool with this path that we're about to do I'm not sure what these guys do I'm just gonna click on default hit apply and what it does is it actually spits out a somewhere there it is this green box and you can identify the tool you'll see that in your your tool path I don't really care what the name of the tool is diameter I do care and I'm in inches so ten inches is a big guy and that's not what I have I have a ten thousand so I'll just say with that your feed when you're walking your tool around is it 20 I hadn't doing 20 inches a second finally the if you're passing moving around you can go a little faster above the surface but here's what's really important here your depth step how far down can the tool drop through the part each plunge you obviously sometimes you can't go all the way the whole depth I'm gonna say my engraver can go let's say 10,000 s I haven't really experimented yet so let's just go with that notice if I can only go ten thousands per step and I'm going a total of 75 I'm gonna have to do many passes to get to that ultimate depth you'll see that happen in a second okay so tool is defined yeah I don't know what a lot of these other things do so I'm just gonna leave that alone let's talk about this m for a minute this is still a in Inkscape shape so it doesn't really have a path associated with it what we can do is we can actually go to path and say object to path I'll do that now what I have if I double-click on it oops I think it's group I'm gonna right-click on it and say ungroup now I could just double click on it and you can see all the nodes that define the path it has now become a simple path which means you can't edit it I can't change this letter from M to a R or something like that anymore unless I undo what I just did it's an exploded path in other words an exploded object okay so what I'm going to do now is I need to fill this with area would actually get the g-code tools to create many paths inside money go to extensions g-code tools and I'm now gonna use the area function up here and you have a few different things area is the one I like the first one because it actually follows the contour if I use fill area the next one over it actually just goes up down you know just does either spiral or up down which could work in some cases for a really fast pocket but if you want a nice-looking area shape I'm gonna stick with the first this value here is how many offsets it's gonna try to do before it gives up it's not gonna try going any further that's good to have because sometimes you can get into a point where it just goes on forever area width you might not want to fill the whole area of this M you maybe from the offset you might only want to do a quarter inch for an eighth inch or something like that that's the case if you don't need the whole area inside filled you can change that what I do is I have this be a fairly relatively large number you can see here's an inch from two to three so obviously this is way thinner than an inch so if I give it a big number it'll just fill it all in finally this is kind of interesting the area to overlap when it offsets how much should each offset be if you're using like an end mill or something maybe you can get away with a full tool diameter or if it's a ball mill then you probably gonna have to do smaller steps to make up for the fact that the mill is curved so this is that value right there I'm gonna do I have kind of an end mill looking things so I'll have a relatively small overlap point one okay now I have to say apply and make sure that you are this is selected and that you're here if you're over here and you say apply and it's not going to work you have to be an area watch here we go it's thinking about it and you can see what it did actually made a whole bunch of curves I have a fairly small engraving tool so it's you know took a walk took a few of them and what's neat is I can hit close I can go in after the fact and in fact and fix some of these things I see here I'm gonna click on this say ungroup because all those curves are grouped together and this will then I'll click on my node tool here and I can actually get rid of some of these things maybe I could just it's that this is a not so much g-code tools fault this is the Inkscape offset tool making some extra stuff that we don't need you know just hopefully the algorithm continues to get better it's pretty good now but you know you can see like this stuff we don't need so a little bit of post-processing here oops I can't delete it too much this this guy here appears to see not sure why I can't click on this that's out you're not gonna harm anything because that's already there and I could spend a while trying to figure out why I can't select that point but I'm gonna ignore that for now everything else looks pretty good so I'm ready to go I'm now gonna select my overall who I haven't turned this into a path yet this is still a rectangle optic in Inkscape so I'm gonna click on this path object to path so now that's all set and we're now scale when I grab that and the curves we've already defined oops by the way we have this black shapes tool behind everything I'm not sure if that's gonna hurt us or not I forget so I'm just gonna grab everything and then let's see what happens I'll go extensions g-code tool the final thing is to actually convert all these shapes into g-code and that's where this option paths g-code comes in where is it going out to again your units there's some interesting stuff for post-processing I don't quite understand yet z-code though sorry Z safe Heights so when the tools moving around above your part as it's trying to go to different places what's a safe distance fifty-thousand fine with me anyway some other stuff I'm not sure what this is although there's some interesting def functions where you can use the color of the geometry to actually cause the DEF to change we'll talk about depth in another tutorial where you can have multiple depths but I don't haven't used this approach yet and I hit apply and let's see what happens because I didn't get rid of that black shape which is really if you think of it without the black just the outer outline I might have a double path on the outside which is not a big deal but you can delete that shape and then you'll be fine you will have a double so you can see what happened here it made a whole bunch of curves and if I go into my g-code directory there it is and let's take a quick look inside I'm going to use a text editor nothing fancy you can see that we go to what we started a safe height of 50,000 then we move to this location and then we actually plunge to ten thousandths in this case and we stay at ten thousands because ten thousands was a safe step size if you remember if we go over here there's my death step ten thousands so we'll go back and what happens is it does this whole path and then you see it does everything at twenty thousands it's actually repeating the same thing if we go up and look at this number you'll see that it appears at the top there it is up there so it's doing the same path until it finally reaches the ultimate depth that we we located in those orientation points here's 30,000 40,000 5060 7075 so got it up to 75 and it's done with that path now it goes on to the next one so it did exactly will be asked it to all right so I think that's a good start for a tutorial I'm gonna my next tutorial will talk about having multiple depths where you can actually have all this stuff on one layer and then have another layer that has another tool and another orientation point which allows you a different depth so you can actually have in the same file lots of different things going on but this is a good start alright thanks for if you have any questions or anything you can put anything on the YouTube chat and if you have any tips something I forgot to add I can rerecord this and bring that in definitely want to make this better because this is a neat tool documentation is kind of hard because it changes so much this program still in heavy development it seems but it's working well for me I really think it's a awesome tool I really appreciate all the programmers developers involved alright thanks

Channel: Matthew Smith

Views: 60,875

Keywords: gcodetools, inkscape, gcode

Id: yUTVOTDbDRI

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Tue May 22 2012