Path Workbench/es

Introducción

El banco de trabajo Trazo es usado para producir instrucciones Codigo-G a partir de un modelo FreeCAD. El lenguaje Codigo-G es utilizado por maquinas CNC y varias impresoras 3D para producir objetos 3D en el mundo real.

La primera herramienta del banco de trabajo trazo es el objeto trazo. Un objeto trazo describe el movimiento que una cabeza de maquina debe ejecutar para cortar a través de un bloque de material, dentro del gabinete de la maquinas CNCs, o agregar material una capa de material imprimible, dentro del gabinete de la impresora 3D. Los objetos trazo pueden contener no solo información de movimiento, sino también otras instrucciones para la maquina, tal como la velocidad de rotación que el cortador debe tener, o la cantidad de material que debe usado.

Path objects can be created in many ways, by giving them manually the points through which they must pass, or deriving them from a wire-shaped FreeCAD object, or, more interestingly, by deriving them automatically from an existing 3D object, or parts of it. This is a complex task, and the tools below are there to do this, or part of this, in different ways. It requires some use to know them all, and choose which one is more suited to the particular task you need. Sometimes, you might also prefer to build your paths step-by-step, using partial tools, instead of using the more complex tools.

Path objects can also be combined into Compounds or Arrays, allowing you to use different tools to do different parts of the whole cutting operation, and join them into one final path.

Project objects, finally, allow you to manage different cutting operations that have to be performed by a same machine, and add machine-specific information such as a table of cutting tools available on the machine, with their characteristics. Some Path tools will then be able to refer to that table to obtain information like the diameter of a certain cutting tool.

Finally, since each type of machine often speaks a different G-Code dialect, when exporting your final Paths to G-Code, you might want to use one of the included post-processing scripts, which translates the machine-agnostic FreeCAD G-Code into a particular flavor recognized by your machine.

FreeCAD is also able to import G-Code files, for which a pre-processing script can also be used.

The Principles of the Process

Warning

The documentation presented here is for FreeCAD V 0.17.

The Path workbench is still in early stages of development. Some of the tools below might not work as expected.

The bracket for the various path elements is the Job. You can think of it as a job you have to do at a real mill: The mill has a certain set of control codes (usually GCode), you use a certain set of tools, you have some stock material, and you start to mill by using the different tools. You can use the same tool for different paths, e.g. milling different pockets.

Scripting

The Path workbench offers a broad python scripting API. With it, you can create and modify paths from python scripts, or extend the available functionality of the workbench.