Freesteel Blog » Global use of Adaptive Clearance

Global use of Adaptive Clearance

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at 7:53 am Written by:

I keep a simple logbook of IPs using the web interface and roughly what people are doing. So far we had users from all continents but Africa. Somebody in Brazil used it a few times, we have users in India, Australia, Canada, USA, all over Europe. Most people only spend a short amount of time, never change to another STL file and don’t seem to use the interactive rotation/zoom/pan. (Could these be bots? I don’t think so, because their IP are often pointing to broadband service providers, and a bot would have to pretend it is a mozilla firefox browser to come as far as seeing a STL file). Others come back regularly, uploading STL files and calcluating toolpaths on them. I think we should invite our users to fill out a survey of how they found out about us, what they use the web interface for, what they don’t like about it … that kind of stuff. Given that people from virtually all corners of the world find us, I find it a little disappointing that we get so few comments in this blog.

5 Comments

  • 1. Francis Irving replies at 6th June 2006, 10:11 am :

    Well, here’s a comment from China for you, but I guess that’s cheating 🙂 Don’t be too surprised how few comments you get – I suspect your percentage is actually pretty good. Very few people make the effort to interact with websites.

    A survey is a good idea, even a compulsory one for a specialist tool like this. Perhaps set a cookie, and the second time they come back have a compulsory survey.

  • 2. Robert replies at 7th June 2006, 2:32 am :

    Well, I don’t have much new to comment on but I’ll post another question-

    What kind of data structure do you use for your stock/simulation model?

  • 3. Cheng-Chang Wu replies at 9th June 2006, 8:38 pm :

    In the coming years I’ll work on CNC for high speed machining. What is your opinion about embedding CAD/CAM in CNC? Is this a trend or just a dream never come true?

    Could you make some comments on STEP-NC?

  • 4. Julian replies at 14th June 2006, 6:42 am :

    STEP-NC? Never heard of it. And the website is too awful to tell anything about it. Have you any better sources?

    Since controllers are now often made from PCs, people can install CADCAM software on them. There’s no technical problem with making it work seamlessly in the way we are use to word-processors driving printers. However, I’m noticing a lot of cultural barriers.

    What kind of data structure for stock/simulation model? In the adaptive code we don’t need one since the results aren’t stored for visualization. Given any point, I can quickly calculate whether it is inside or outside the remaining stock, and then I throw it away since it’s unlikely I’ll ever need to refer to that particular point at that particular state of the toolpath again.

  • 5. Garry B replies at 14th June 2006, 9:50 pm :

    I went to a talk about STEP-NC at MACH 2004 (or maybe it was 2002…)

    I wasn’t very impressed, I thought they were moving the wrong way. Essentially it came to getting machining algorithm calculation onto the controller, whereas my personal opinion is it makes more sense that you would move more of the controller work onto the computer (much like Julian’s printer analogy).

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