I have noticed that CC is very inefficient at choosing its order of cuts within a toolpath. In the attached image you will see all the red pocket slots that I was cutting in one toolpath. Why doesn’t CC do one slot and then go to the one right next to it and so on? Instead it will randomly jump around to different slots wasting time. Is there not a way to program it to be more efficient like other programs do? Or is there something I can do in my designing process?
It’s a known issue. The cut ordering in CC is just awful, see this post for example:
It’s hard to tell just from the results, but it appears that the cut order is essentially based on some internal order that is unrelated to cutting - some kind of dependency on both Y order and winding number. There doesn’t appear to be any optimization applied to cut ordering, not even something simple like the greedy algorithm.
The only “workaround” is manual ordering - toolpaths are run in the order you specify them.
Creating a sign for a friend with multiple rows of text, I noticed my Shapeoko Pro would sometimes write a letter or two of a word, zip across the wood to write two letters on a different line, then come back and finish the incomplete word.
I think Will Adams calls the condition Traveling Salesman. CC has improved over years. This is a good reason to set your retract as low as practical so rapids take less time.
When I first got some mapping software on my PC back in 95 it tried every road possible when evaluating paths. It took longer to calculate a 4 hour route than it did to drive it.
Now that traveling salesman has Waze and he gets where he needs to go quickly but he does have to indicate the order of the stops.maybe one day we could define some parameters to help with that.
