Milling questions

[Xylotica]

At last !
Wall-E is operationnal, and I thought I'd start out with a little bit of wood milling.
I had this large log (which, it turns out had nails in it) and I made a wavy surface on one corner.
Then I thought I ougth to make multiple offsets so that I could "dig" layer by layer until I reached the actual surface I want to achieve.
So I just selected the surfaces one by one starting with the "highest" down to the "deepest" surface and used a "Divide surface" component.
I was quite happy until the mill went in a straight line between the final point of the first surface, and the initial point of the second surface, making a deep groove in the wood.
Then I realized that indeed I was a newb in all his glory.

But thinking about it, how could I add an intermediate point to avoid this since this is just one component ?
Should I use one "divide surface"component per surface and add an offset component between each ?
This would be impossible if I had a large number of layers to mill, wouldn't it ?

Then I realized another problem with the "divide surface"component : it forces to alternate between "Down milling" and "Up milling" since the mill will always go back and forth on the surface.
It was easy to see because in one direction, all went fine, and in the other, I could see large chips of wood being thrown all over the place.
What is the trick to make sure the milling is always ,say, "Up milling"?

Cheers

[Johannes @ Robots in Architecture]

Hello,

I would strongly recommend to add safety movements to avoid such problems - the Toolaxis Offset is generally a good idea as it shifts the tool by its tool axis. If you add process three surfaces with the Divide Surface component it is going to output three lists of movements. Just plug them into the Toolaxis Offset component and by default you will add an offset movement at the beginning and at the end of each list. For the robot, flatten the three lists into one list and you're good to go.

If you only want to mill in one direction, I've created a quick example as both regular components and as a cluster. As you're using the member version I've used that, but it should also be useful for anyone with the current free version. Just ignore the error messages and turn the planes into LIN movements.

Hope that helps,
Best,

Johannes

[Xylotica]

Thanks Johannes,

I feel that this is really useful for the milling people out there.
I never thought of using "Weave" to replace a "Stream filter" component, and points to store (u,v) coordinates.
The way you create the path structure for the frames is smart too.

To get the same functionnality as the original "Divide surface" component, I added an orientation input.
Perhaps this could be the first step towards buiding a more evolved milling component ?

Cheers,