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I got a new order for a tray that I made awhile back (Offset Open Path). I haven’t touched my Easel file since July when it was working properly.
I went to make a new one and found some curious behavior with the tool path. The two curves were broken up into five different segments and carved one at a time (as shown by the z-axis travel paths) rather than cutting the full curve each pass as it used to do.
Not only was each portion of the curve carved separately, but it would only start from one end. This meant that for each new depth it would return to the safety height in z and then travel back to the original entry point for each segment, if that makes sense. This was repeated for each new segment of the previously continuous curved path which obviously made my carve time ridiculous compared to what it should be.
Any idea if something has changed within Easel that would have caused this?
It is the fix to stop climb milling that everyone was ( at least 2 or 3 people ) complaining about. I have the same issue on one of my carves. You can’t make all the people happy all the time !
Thanks for the link. I read through the thread and it looks like the optimized tool paths were correctly applied for the other four cuts (finishing one completely before moving to the next) with the exception of the two curved paths in the center.
You mentioned using “Optimize Tool Paths”, is that something I can manually apply? Unless I’m missing something, from reading the thread you referenced, it sounds like that is all behind the scenes work and is applied universally.
I’m not certain if it can be manually applied or if it all behind the scenes. But given the nature of your issue, I thought it might be useful. You could address your comment to the Inventables team. I’m sure they can help you far better than my meager skills.
That makes sense, I can’t tell for certain either. At first, I read your comment as if there was a button or command somewhere that I hadn’t used before, which would have been awesome because it would have meant an easy fix. Your “meager skills” are more than appreciated, thanks for the input!
Hopefully I can figure out what is going on soon. From looking over the forum it sounds like they may be busy addressing some other issues (which may or may not be related) so I’ll try to contact them later if I don’t hear anything. Thanks again
Thanks for the heads up, @PhilJohnson . From reading the thread it looks like the changes haven’t been rolled out yet, but hopefully the fixes will help whatever caused the segmenting of curves.
@rodovich@DavidAltenburg1 Any idea if the changes you are in the process of implementing would address what I am seeing and restore this situation to how it was carving a few months ago?
@Ruwan Is there a chance someone from the Inventables team could take a quick look and see if this behavior is normal? The main issue is that the different segments of the curve are being cut separately rather than as a single continuous curve like it used to do.
I have an order that’s on hold until I can figure out how to fix this.
I’m not sure why this is a showstopper. When mine does this, at the end of the day the cut still comes out OK, and even with the what might be considered to be a delay, the total cut time drops from 21 minutes to 17. I know this for sure because on either Sat or Sun they reverted back to the old architecture for about 18hrs and I noticed the difference in cut, but also the longer cut time. That is my experience.
I appreciate the input. In this particular application it went from about 9 minutes to well over 30. With the size of the order I have, I simply don’t have the extra time to fit these in between my other orders with such a large increase in cut time.
This is my best attempt in Paint to visually describe what I am experiencing. The curve with the five red line segments I drew in used to cut as a single pass, following the curve. Each pass would be a new depth as shown in my crude drawing on the bottom right.
Now it’s behaving like the top right, but for each individual segment. It starts with the straight segment, cuts about three inches until the straight portion ends, retracts to the safety height and returns back to the starting point. It does this for each depth. Then it starts at the next portion of the curve and cuts about two inches until the tangency point of the next curve and does the same thing until all five segments of the profile are cut.
@Andy4us Is this the same thing you are seeing with yours or slightly different?
You mentioned that you saw weird behavior with an aluminum part. Is this the same thing you experienced? I have seen changes with the order of operations and the safety height retracting before, but never the segmenting of a single profile.
