Freesteel Blog » 2005 » September

Tuesday, September 27th, 2005 at 9:35 pm - - Machining 1 Comment »

It’s taken two days to program, but it now appears to be working. The structure of subdividing any part of the area model (based on the initial structure) should be general purpose enough to handle the constant scallop machining when I begin.

Tuesday, September 20th, 2005 at 5:37 pm - - Machining, Whipping

Spending too much time on Tunnel, and also bits of Publicwhip, doing final bits to make the parsoing and Er Wang Dong surveys to work respectively.

Now onto a bit of Freesteel. Peter wants some constant scallop machining out of us by the end of the year. We’ve agreed. I hope to make it possible to do it as a spiral offset so it overcomes many of the constant offset problems we normally get.

First step is to make the weave subdivision to work. This enables contour sharpening, and is quite a hard prospect since all the weave iterators have to be upgraded to handle the more complicated structure. The scallop toolpaths are going to be embedded into this structure.

Meantime, I’m clearing all known asserts from the standard code. Martin is fiddling with the interface of the freesteel webpage so all operations can be done from one page instead of many (which I didn’t like and argued at length about). I sent off a cheque for the new freesteel internet computer yesterday (1400 quid). Martin sent a cheque to Germany for our mini machine tool (500 quid). We’re going to keep the costs separate since freesteel computer is also going to handle Publicwhip in its spare capacity.

Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 10:31 pm - - Machining 11 Comments »

We had it working in the past, a version of Freesteel that can be run via cgi over the web. Well, it’s working again, follow this link. It is quite fun to write web applications like this, I have certainly learned a lot about scripting and dynamic web pages. There are a lot more things that could be done to make the online version more useable, but it will do for now.
The main purpose is to point interested people to the online version to test the algorithm for themselves. It is effortless to use, and if you are prepared to install a plug-in to visualise vrml worlds, it could almost pass as a graphic, interactive demonstration version. It might be easier to ask somebody interested in our work to use a web interface than to give them a CD or ask them to download a demo version that needs installing on a computer. More advantages are: no need to write installation procedures; being independent of any operating system (all you need is a web browser and access to the internet); usage is easily traceable (a demo CD might just end up in the bin).