Inkscape to Sheetcam to CommandCNC Video Tutorial

[Music] okay I'm gonna make this video I've had some people asking about the process like on the StarLab going from designing something Inkscape pulling it into chic am applying a cut process and then opening it in command C&C to actually cut it out so it's probably gonna be a super short video but we'll just run through it real quick as quick as I can first time we're doing Inkscape I'm going to import a drawing I'm gonna import one deliberately that I know I can cause a few problems with just for showing that in Inkscape or if she came I mean okay so I'm importing it click okay so I've got this image here you just got your new plasma table you're wanting to cut something out I pulled in this PNG image and I'm gonna go up here to go to path trace bitmap and then this windows gonna pop up I always click this box right here hopefully you see that I'm taking this with my phone but we'll click that box that gives me a live preview of what the trace is gonna look like then I normally adjust the brightness cutoff up a little on a black and white photo and you can also go into options and adjust this optimize paths up a little bit that'll reduce the number of nodes that the trace produces so after I've got my settings where I want I hit OK it doesn't look like anything happened but now if I click on this you see if this is a path on top here's my image on bottom so now I can delete the image don't need it anymore and I've got my path here so just to show what happens if you make an error I'm not gonna fix a few obvious problems I know this is gonna have it I'm just going to file save as call it flowers pick a folder to save it in I'm just gonna save it in this clip bar to folder okay now I've got a SVG named flower saved in my folder so I'm gonna close this I'm gonna leave this window open but just minimize it and jump over to sheet cam now in sheet cam I'm gonna go to file import drawing and then I'm going to find my folder clipart to select SVG because that's the type of file i'm importing and you can do and the cheat cam you can import an SVG DXF and a few other file types I only use SVG and DXF so I'm gonna select SVG and I'll scroll down and find that flowers SVG this should be it and hit open then it's going to ask me how I want to scale this if it were a DXF I'd select a different option here but on an SVG I'm gonna click on that and set that at 1 to 1 otherwise just gonna bring it in really big so I'm gonna set a 1 to 1 ratio for an SVG and hit OK it's gonna always run through this little dialogue here removing duplicate vectors generally that doesn't cause any kind of problem it can take different amounts of time on different drawings I don't know how complicated it is when it's done running this little thing your local my drawing up this one's taking unusual amount of time normally it does not take that long there we go and there we see we have the drawing we just pulled it in it's got a path should be good to go well the first of that first problem here is you should have read for outside contours and yellow for inside contours if you've got red contours inside of yellow contours you have a problem because what's gonna happen is it's gonna cut this out and then it's gonna cut this out and that's gonna fall out you're gonna lose all your detail there I did that on purpose just to show what would happen or how to identify you have a problem and she came these flowers on the inside should look just like this lower left flower here it should all be yellow if you've got red inside of yellow you you've got an error in your drawing that's a good way if you double check your drawing when you bring it in to catch issues like where you forgot to bridge a letter something like that you see a red centre inside of an R or a D or an A well you didn't bridge it and it's gonna fall out you know lose your detail so I'll switch back over to Inkscape and fix something like that it'd be pretty easy I'll just hit on this drawing I'll select it and hit shift control K I'll break it apart I'll unselect it's kind of hard to see them but I'll click in the middle there there we go and unselect those centerpieces and I'm gonna hit ctrl K it doesn't look like anything's happened but what's happened is I've detached these centerpieces so now I'll move it to a position where you know maybe something like that it's not gonna cooperate real well but I'll move it somewhere like that move this somewhere like this I'll just it's gonna probably produce a few errors but I'm just gonna go ahead and leave it just to show you a few other problems probably and she can't so I've got that move where that's gonna bridge to that this here is gonna bridge here and here someone select both of those by holding shift and clicking both of them hit shift ctrl + Union those together and then I'm gonna select the main body of this design by holding shift and clicking it shift ctrl + and now I'm gonna zoom out and I'm going to save this again I'm just gonna hit save this time because I've already saved the files little just override it now go back to sheet cam I could delete this just right-click it and delete it or you can just file import drawing if you import drawing without selecting new part it will basically replace the last drawing that you brought in so I'm going to import it again there's flowers open one two one [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay now brought it in as you can see the centers are yellow inside of the red shouldn't be any problems in theory now the next thing we'll do I've got my drawing I've brought it in I don't see any errors here I'm gonna go up to operation plasma cut and then I'm gonna apply my plasma operation and when you go into this window I generally always run an outside offset but you can pick outside offset inside offset no I'll set I always run an outside offset on my drawings so I select outside offset and I'm gonna select a layer that's white that's gonna leave for that SVG it can it can have different names for the layer you just select whatever is there basically that's what you want to apply the operation to then you select the tool you want to run I'm gonna be cutting in 16 gauge steel so this is the tool I want to run if you want to cut with a different process you've got all these different options you can scroll down through find the set the the material you're cutting and the amperage you want to cut it at and you select that tool but I'm cutting 16 gauge steel so I'm leaving that you can apply path rules here different rules I only run a rule for holes just slow down a little on holes okay then you can come down you can set your lead-in length what type of lead-in you want what type of lead out I generally don't run a lead out on artwork I do run a lead in then I hit OK and that's going to apply the plasma cut operation to this drawing now what you got here I think I've actually got on this machine I've got another rule set for small shapes so a shape under a certain size it's going to slow down automatically and this contour here this contour here under that size limit so it's indicating that that's going to apply a rule there with the light blue color the greens is just gonna be a standard cut there's no rule being applied on those green cuts so actually I thought I would end up with some errors here but apparently the drawing was big enough will you bring one in you apply a plasma operation sometimes you don't want to look at it because you'll have spots like like this here this could have been too tight where the kerf wouldn't fit so then you're gonna see it's actually going to come over it's going to stop loop back and it's not going to complete the cut in a small section but this surprisingly it came close here to being too tight but it's gonna pass but see you're gonna want to look it over to make sure there aren't any errors you didn't catch in your drawing and there's not any issues like what I'm talking about this actually looks like it would cut surprisingly as we're as fast as I did it but let's just say for argument's sake I'm gonna go back to the drawing and Inkscape and just show you what it would look like if I did have an error there so I'm gonna grab I'm gonna go to my node editor click on it and I'm gonna grab one of these nodes here and I'm just gonna drag it over where I know it's gonna be too tight and it's gonna cause a problem so there we go that's that there's no way the plasma curves gonna fit through there I'm gonna say file/save again back over to sheet cam and like I say you don't have to delete this if you're importing it'll it'll overwrite this one I'm gonna hit file import drawing flowers again open it up and because I didn't delete this and there's already an operation applied to it when it brings it in it's still gonna have that operation applied to this drawing so we'll give that a minute let that come in I've never seen such a simple drawing take so long to import but of course the one I use for a video is gonna take forever there it goes it's coming in and now we should have an issue here this is what I meant you come in here you see that's actually turned this one cut into two separate cuts because that curve can't fit through there so you want to check for spots like these on your drawings when you're applying your plasma cut if you've got something like that that tells you that contours too tight you can jump back over to your drawing program which mine's Inkscape and adjust this to where a plasma curve will fit through here but other than that let's just say I don't even I don't care about that I'm gonna go ahead and send this to the cutter something else that you commonly will use in here is you've got sheet cams gone through and put it start points where it wants them where it thinks they need to be if you want to adjust your start points you don't like the order maybe you want to rearrange the order because you know you're trying to spread out the heat and keep it from warping or I've had probably the most common reason I move a start point is I have this drawing and I have another one nested above it and the start point is gonna run into the other drawing you can edit your start points by coming up here in the top toolbar how easy that is to see but you click on that and then now I can come in here and I can move these start points like this one here is right on that contour I can move it down here and click wherever I move around I don't know how well you see that but that start points following my cursor if I click it's moving that start point to that position if you wanted to rearrange them you can right-click and do quick cut sequence and then it's gonna start on number one so this is number two right now if I want that to be number one I click there it's going to tell me that you know the operation is set to automatically optimize optimize pass changing the order with disable optimization do you want to continue it yes now I've changed that to number one now when I come down here there's not very many start points on this drawing but I come down to here it's gonna be number two I come over here make that number three you can rearrange them however you want and when you're done you just right click in sequence and now you're out of that editing mode but anyways just a couple things there if I were nesting here I'm not nesting on this drawing obviously but let me turn the cut off so you can see it if I were gonna nest you come up here to this little cross arrow looking icon it says nesting when you hover over each click on that that's gonna turn white I let you know you're in nesting mode and then if I wanted to cut multiple of these I can right click hit multiple duplicate and as you see it pops up another I can drop drop a couple of these however I want when you're done the same as the same as a start point editing editing you right-click and hit cancel and that will stop you can also right-click if you just if you just want one duplicate you can just select duplicate and it will only do one after you drop it it won't make another one and you can work your way around the sheet setting those wherever you want if you click on them and hit your arrow buttons it will rotate it or you can come down at the bottom you can adjust your coordinates down here like say on this particular drawing I want that to be on the edge of the sheet not up here rather than trying to bump it around I can just go to the y coordinate in or 0 hit enter and now that's dropped down to the edge of the sheet I can't really think of much else really relevant there so let's just say that's that's how I want to do that I can put my turn my go back out of nesting turn my cut operation back on now because these are duplicates it automatically is going to apply the cut operation to all the duplicates so I don't have to go in and reapply the cut operation to each duplicate each new drawing you bring in you'll have to apply a separate cut operation if you bring in a new part like say in this particular instance I want to bring in a new one you would go to file new part don't go to file import drawing if you do that a little it will replace the last drawing you brought in so always go to new part if you're bringing in multiple parts but anyway now I've got that let's say that's how I wanted it nested and I've got my plasma cut operation applied I will go up to file run post processor and then I will that will bring up the folder I save all my tap files in it's called flowers tab I'm just gonna leave that it's saved okay now it's run the post process or you can see all the cuts been processed hit OK then you can close out of sheet cam go to command C and see when you open command C and C it's always going to come up with e stop activated so you just hit that button turn the e-stop off normally first turn the machine on you're also going to hit home X home Y that's going to run the x and y coordinates to the home position once they've reached the home position to hit the home switches if your machine has home switches you can 0 X 0 Y and then you're ready to start your start your CAD now as you see here I don't have a drawing so I'm gonna go to open go to desktop I go to my tap file folder and then you scroll down through all your tap files I've got a mess on there and you find the one you just made there's flowers tap hit open and that's gonna bring that drawing in and then once you've got it in you've got everything set there's really not much generally want to turn it on not much to do here just hit imported wrong at first a home it zero everything where I want it and then bring my drawing in and then when I'm ready I hit run and resume and it'll take off I'm on I'm not gonna actually cut this but I'll turn the DTAC off and the disabled torch function off that'll let me run it without actually cutting so I would hit run it's gonna come up with a splash screen giving me a minute to check my settings make sure everything looks like it's loaded right from the g-code I might hit okay after I hit okay I hit resume and that baby's gonna take off cut so that's basically running through from making a drawing applying the cut operation and she came opening that up in command CNC and starting your cut hopefully it helps some people out some new guys that are a little curious about the workflow process on a Linux based command cnce unit by

Channel: Bad Dog Metalworks

Views: 3,810

Keywords: Bad Dog Metalworks, Inkscape Tutorials, Inkscape for Dummies, How-To Videos, Sheetcam, CommandCNC, CNC Plasma Cutting, baddogmetalworks.com, Bad Dog Metal Signs, Graphic Design, Inkscape videos, How to Inkscape, Inkscape Video Tutorial, CNC, Bad Dog Metalworks Inkscape Tutorials

Id: Ba5vbbmodgE

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020