I’m very new to CNC but I have quite a bit of CAD experience. I’m setting together my new Shapoko Pro and I would like to also use a drag knife with 3mm offset on my new machine to make cardboard boxes. Researching the tools, also on this forum I don’t see a conviniet way to create the gcodes for my planned projects and wanted to ask for help here.
What would be the best tool to create (based on a SVG) the toolpath for a cardboard-cutting drag knife with a couple of milimeters offset from the center if I want to do it on a mac? I currently use Rhino for my 3D CAD-Stuff but I can export SVG or DXF of course.
Is there a hidden function In Carbide Create or are there other decent tools around?
Carbide Create currently does not directly support such offsets — you can sort of do it by manually editing them into a toolpath and using a no offset contour, but that requires a bit of experimentation.
The Donek folks have an Excel spreadsheet which does this, and there are a couple of opensource options:
Thanks a lot William! I didn’t know about Inkcut and bCNC, I will check them out both. Dxf2gcode triggers a lot of compilation warning on OSX, that’s why I’d rather avoid it if I find a better solution, but bCNC looks promising.