Rastercarve - open source

Ran across this today - “Rastercarve” . Thought some others would find it useful.

Live version: https://rastercarve.live

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Really cool, @mikep. Thanks for sharing. I’ve seen small programs that do the same type of thing, but this looks about as simple as it could be.

This is a neat tool. Reverse the image (possibly invert the image), carve on the back of acrylic and light it up.

Make sure that the tool angle matches that used to generate the toolpath (30 degrees is the default – change this if needed).

-t TOOL_ANGLE included angle of tool (deg) (default: 30)

However, I still get confused why in one “community” the tool angle is stated in one way and another “community” it is stated in another.

I can only assume that a “30 degree” bit angle is specified for an engraving bit. If it was a V-bit then it would be equivalent to stating a “60 degree” angle.

Is that a bad assumption?

This tool is very similar to the photo VCarce toolpath creator in VCarve and Aspire.

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Author here. I’m pleasantly surprised you picked this up.

I’ve been working on this as a passion project for the last few months; if you find it useful I’d appreciate any donations you may give. I have a writeup of the development process here: https://www.fwei.tk/blog/

However, I still get confused why in one “community” the tool angle is stated in one way and another “community” it is stated in another.
I can only assume that a “30 degree” bit angle is specified for an engraving bit. If it was a V-bit then it would be equivalent to stating a “60 degree” angle.

TOOL_ANGLE refers to the complete angle formed by the cross section of the tool; it’s not a “half angle” as you seem to be describing.

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Carbide Create used to use the taper angle, half the nominal angle usually used for specifying endmill angle — it now uses the nominal angle.

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I certainly haven’t been around for long, but these two statements seem to be describing the same thing, but neither alleviates my confusion with my quote above about “-t TOOL_ANGLE included angle of tool (deg) (default: 30)”.

I guess that I have never seen a bit with that tight of an angle. I must learn more.

Here is a 30deg
vbit https://www.toolstoday.com/woodworking/30-Degree-V-Bit

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Small angle V bits are usually sold as “engraving bits”. I do somewhat conflate the terms in the documentation – feel free to submit a pull request to resolve this.

Probably the same reason one 0,0 in the lower left (making the working surface upper right quadrant, and all positive), and the machining world where 0,0 is back right, making the working quadrant all negative. Neither group can readily explain why they do it they way they do, but software written for one way tends to “behave less well than one would hope” when used on a machine set up the opposite (ie. laser sw on a machining rig)

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Probably the same reason one 0,0 in the lower left (making the working surface upper right quadrant, and all positive), and the machining world where 0,0 is back right, making the working quadrant all negative. Neither group can readily explain why they do it they way they do, but software written for one way tends to “behave less well than one would hope” when used on a machine set up the opposite (ie. laser sw on a machining rig)

On that note, I should mention that RasterCarve assumes the 0, 0 position is the top left (or back left) corner, and that +X points right and +Y points up (or back). It will then engrave in the +X and -Y directions (i.e. right and down). I’ve tested these to be sensible on several ShopBots, but other machines may vary.

These settings are currently not configurable from the frontend, but I plan to add support for this in a future version.

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