Has anyone used files from Design and Make for Shapeoko projects

[Gerryattrick (Alan Nicholson)]

I get the Design and Make newsletter and they have some quite good models…some even free.

It seems to me that they can be had in PNG , STL and Vectric formats but not SVG. Has anyone used these in Carbide Create for SO3 projects or do you need to have one of the Vectric CAD packages to use them to create gcode.

Anyone have experience that can share?

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

Wrote up a bit about this here:

Vectric tutorial overview

Vectric makes a line of popular software products. Here is one example of a workflow to create a G-Code file using these applications. Of especial interest is Design and Make, available from: http://www.designandmake.com/ — AIUI, this application / web site was originally a 3rd party, but was purchased by Vectric. The software “Design and Make Machinist” is freely available, and will allow one to use free and purchased clipart, adjusting and repositioning it as desired, then export it into a fo…

[gdon_2003 (Guy Donham)]

If you can get png you can use free Inkscape to convert to SVG. There are several online converters to take almost any format and output to svg or just about any other format.

[Gerryattrick (Alan Nicholson)]

Thanks @willadams. I’ll have a read tonight. I already have D & M Machinist which I am about to try.

[Gerryattrick (Alan Nicholson)]

@gdon_2003 thanks for your reply. I have used Inkscape for SVG conversions before…not always successfully. Also Fenrus’ app is great as an SVG converter. I was interested to see if snyone had actually used D & M files in a project on the Shapeoko and whether they had any issues. I plan to try one of their free projects to see how things go.

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

Carbide Create now as a native facility for tracing (which is one of the best implementations I’ve ever used):

Carbide Create - Image Tracing

We just posted CC 520 to: https://carbide3d.com/carbidecreate/download/ 520 includes a big new feature for us, Image Tracing. [image] You should be able to load a JPG or PNG and get a reasonable set of curves from it very quickly. A few caveats: Right now, it’s mono only so color images will be converted to black and white using the thresholds in the window. We’re not optimizing for very small images so some will work well, others won’t. We’d recommend images larger than 500px on a side …

[Gerryattrick (Alan Nicholson)]

Thats great…I missed that feature and the fact that its mono only helps me as I have some grey scale and colour images that I want to convert to black and white and was planning to try Inkscape but it will be nice to just be able to use CC instead.

I find I am spending more and more time putting the effort in to CC before I consider an upgrade to CC Pro.