PROJECTS - SOFTWARE

2004 / 2005

Latest c# .NET projects are here: www.gatefold.co.uk/smurf

3DG - 1998

I wrote this program to create 3D reliefs using a Boxford VMC260 CNC milling machine and it's CNC software. The example above has been created using a 100x100x8 greyscale bitmap the luminance is linearly proportional to the milling depth. The relief above is not very detailed due to the constraints of the Boxford program that cannot cope with more than about 800 lines of G-Code.
The program 'scans' the milling cutter line by line accross the work and changes height according to the bitmap and the constraints in properties. The properties allow the size of the work, the type of milling cutter (diameter, bull-nose, etc), resolution of scanning, what type of look ahead is required and whether the cut depth should be quantized (helps reduce number of lines of code). The code generated is optimized by removing lines that are redundant (i.e. the depth has not changed). This version is written in VB 5, and is quite slow, I will be attempting to re-write it it delphi when the need arises.

Download 3DG (220 kB) Requires standard VB5 runtimes (get from microsoft) and a few ocx's