Disclaimer: I’m still very new to the Carbide environment and CNC cutting in general but one of the tasks assigned to my Nomad is engraving precut aluminum tags. We are working on a fixture to hold 20 tags at a time, this should not really be a problem.
What I’m more worried about is a solution for doing the CAD/CAM work. The numbers are 5 digit and need to be in sequential order, is there some sort of way to automate this process? Ideally I’d like to just specify a default font/size and the first number and have the rest of the numbers generate in the correct locations. The toolpath setting will always be the same.
I’m not really sure about how to do this, I am willing to spend money on software if necessary.
It should be pretty straightforward to make one Carbide Create file w/ unique placeholders, then work up a program which takes a CSV from Excel or a database and writes out a version of the file with the placeholders replaced w/ actual data.
Alternately, you could write a script which would do this in Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator or Adobe InDesign, or do it w/ TeX or LaTeX — for the latter see the tools referenced in my paper:
Or do it as a mail-merge to a PDF in Microsoft Word and then convert the PDF to an SVG.
Or just post a sample file here or to support@carbide3d.com listing the tools you have and noting how you’d like to approach this and we’ll be glad to work something out.
If I understand him correctly, if you had (say) 6x6 tags on a jig, you would run a program which would take a source CC file (say TagsMaster.c2d) and it would generate a series of files like TagsMaster1000-1036.c2d and TagsMaster1036-1072.c2d etc which would have generated numbers replacing the fixed values in TagsMaster.c2d.
You’d have to load each of these into CC to generate the .nc files though. Unless there’s a way to call Carbide Create in a batch mode to generate a .nc file. If not, that would be a useful enhancement.
EDIT: I actually need something similar to this. I can build it just fine and share it, but that would be dependant on CC having a batch mode to convert a .c2d to a .nc since I’m unwilling to load 50 files and save them. Mainly because CC doesn’t offer to prompt for a sensible default name for a .nc file… as in, if you load “Fred.c2d” and then do “Save GCode”, it says “huh… no idea what to call this” and leaves the default file name blank. And the directory is wrong… and… well…
