Tabs - Specify Amount and Placement

So if I have edited the Tab positions, they will always be in the edited positions every time I open the project?

Only projects that were created before editing was possible will have tabs is a new position.

If that is correct then no problem! The original tab placement was not so good anyway, I assume I would always want to adjust the tabs in an old project before I carved it again.

Edit

It would be nice if a warning box popped on old projects that contained tabs, telling the user to check the position before carving. Once the tabs were viewed/edited the message would not be displayed again for that file.

not a problem :smile:

Correct. Also, for any project created after this feature is launched, the tabs will be in the same spot whether you move them or not.

2 Likes

Sounds fine to me.

Sounds great - my current problem is that the tabs always seems place themselves on corners or other irritating places, making removal a bit hard.

Sounds like a wonderful upgrade.

Not a problem Jeff. :smile:

Since I’m so new to Easel, how do I edit the tabs? I’m working on a router insert plate and the tabs are so thick that you need to use a saw to remove them. So any direction on how to change the tabs would be greatly appreciated.

Newbie to Easel
Gailen

You cannot yet. This is about a coming feature.

@JeffTalbot – I would take ANY changes to tabs, be it better generation of placement or adjustability.

I’ve done a bunch of little cut pieces for my wife’s jewelry (arrowheads, hearts, etc) - and it seems that the automatic generation almost always places at least 1 tab on either the inside corner (think the little stub that comes out the arrowhead, or the inside “notch” of the heart) or a sharp outside corner that is then somewhat rounded by a tab that needs to be cut off and sanded/filed back to a point.

There certainly needs to be some sort of “angle between 2 points” that is considered too sharp (inside or outside) to place a tab between them.

No that would not be a problem. In fact, it would be welcome. Easel put tabs in very awkward places in some of my projects.

It would be no problem at all - it would be welcome!!

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for all the feedback on the preservation of original tab positions!

I have a follow-up question. How bad would it be if the spindle raised to the safety height when avoiding tabs (instead of only to the tab height)?

One of the changes the new feature introduces is that tabs are treated essentially like any other element in your design that “lifts” material out of another element (like when you drop a shape with 0 cut depth on top of another shape). As a by product of that, the spindle will raise all the way to the safety height when avoiding tabs as the new feature is currently implemented. Normally your number of tabs will be small, and the height of the tabs will be small as well, so hopefully the number of safety height raises for tabs wouldn’t impact the job time too much. But I wanted to hear your thoughts.

We have a couple of options:

  1. Launch with the feature raising to the safety height around tabs, and then do an optimization in the future to raise only to the tab height around tabs (along with other optimizations we plan to do to eliminate unnecessary safety height raises in general in Easel)

  2. Don’t release the feature until we can make it lift only to the tab height when avoiding tabs. This would delay the feature’s release (probably by at least a week), as we retrofit some code to have special treatment of tabs during g-code generation

Please vote:

  • Option 1: Lifting to the safety height around tabs is OK for now, try to improve it in the future
  • Option 2: Don’t release this feature until you can avoid lifting to the safety height around tabs

0 voters

Jeff

Question: If I am cutting a 1/2 inch profile on a piece of 1/2 inch thick material and the tab is 1/8 inch high, does the spindle cut the profile without pulling up to the safety height until it is 1/8 inch from the bottom of the material? And then on each pass around when it gets to the tab position it retracts the spindle to safety height?

Or does does the spindle retract every time it gets to where the tab is even if it has not yet reached the top of the tab?

It wouldn’t lift to the safety height until it got below the tab height (in this case 1/8" from the bottom).

1 Like

Lifting to safety height is not ideal, but I think the advantages of having movable tabs is worth the additional time it would take.

Any chance that it would be possible to set a job specific safety height?

I am only cutting plastics that are 2 or 3 mm thick - so option 1 would be fine with me.

Allen, if you go to Machine, Advanced, you can set the safety height to a minimum of 0.1mm if you need to. But it’s a project specific change.

1 Like

I think pushing the release back a week is a small price to pay to have a more refined feature. Any time savings is always my number one priority!

Hi Everyone,

This feature has been released. See this forum post:

Cheers,
Jeff

3 Likes