Drill holes treated as pocket tool paths

Fabber General
#1

This may be a metric/imperial problem but here goes… (i’m in Australia and everything is metric).

We have a 3mm diameter drill bit for our CNC machine and thus, I’ve been placing a series of 3mm diameter holes in my SketchUp designs. 3mm in imperial roughly equates to 0.1181 of an inch. So, before exporting an SVG, I set the tool diameter to 0.1181". Upon import into 2D Cut Pro (this is a cut down version of Aspire that supports gadgets), all 3mm holes are specified as pocket rather than drill tool paths.

I’m wondering whether this might be because there is a fractional inaccuracy between 3mm and 0.1181" and Fabber finds 3mm and 0.1181" holes to be a ‘different’ diameter from each other?

I looked at the ‘Fabber Ventric Overview’ video and at the 9 minute mark it is stated that ‘holes 1/4" and under will be ignored’. Is this still the case? Has the toggle been added yet? - If so I can’t find it.

Any insights?

#2

Hmm… this is an interesting one… So here’s how it’s supposed to work:

When you hit the settings button and you set your tool diameter our plugin will treat any circles that match the tool size as drill holes. Any that are larger are pockets, and any that are smaller aren’t exported.

Maybe try this:

Try .11811 as the diameter of the tool, also try going to Window>Model Info and setting the units to decimal inches, and go out 4-5 decimal places and give it another try.

It should work… If that doesn’t work post your model here and I’ll take a look at it.

#3

No problem, I’ll give this a whirl and see if it works. The other thought I had is to simply change the diameter of my holes in the sketchup design to .1181 of an inch. Then the export script should pick them up because they will match exactly.

While we’re on this topic, any news on metric support? Is there enough demand?

cheers.

#4

Please let me know how it goes!

As far as metric support, we technically support any unit that SketchUp supports natively, which means we support metric.

However, most of the testing as been done in Imperial.

Give that new circle diameter a shot and see what happens, also, how many decimal places do you have SketchUp set it in Model Info>Units. It might be worth checking this:

Change the units to 5 decimal places, and then right click on one of your circles and go to Entity info and see the number it reports for the radius. Perhaps you drew the model at 1-2 decimal places and there’s a rounding error…

If you want, post the model and I can have a look.

#5

Hi Eric,
I’m not in the workshop again until next week but I will most definitely post the results here.

With regard to the metric/imperial situation I thought I would elaborate a little more. The difficulties are manageable inside Sketchup during design or upon export of the SVG. Of course, I am able to do a couple of conversions of material thickness and plunge depth etc.

For me when I import the SVG into the CAM software is where it gets more difficult. I’m forced to change all units to imperial and after running the Fabber gadget, the different tool path layers are created and they all read in imperial units. When one ‘thinks’ in metric it makes it hard to cross check and identify anomalies and errors. For example all the pocket depth values are completely unfamiliar and I have to sit there with a calculator while I check every tool path. We also use quite a number of drilling depths for our various fixings and I feel a little overwhelmed when looking over the results of the Fabber gadget in the CAM software.

Reading back over this, I sound like I’m whinging about nothing!! I’d like you to know that we here are very excited about the prospect of bringing Fabber into our workflow 100%, but if you want to take your software to the next level, I think this would be a critical factor for us, at least.

#6

I’m totally with you, the whole point of Fabber is it’s supposed to be as fast as possible, and having to sit there with a calculator certainly isn’t that.

There’s some good news and bad news here: We’re working on metric, with that update is going to come a bunch of massive improvements over what we’re currently offering. Bad news is that it’s not coming next week, or the week after :slight_smile:

Would it be possible to share one of your models? I’m thinking through a few things, but I don’t want send you on a wild chase until I test a few things…

#7

Hi again,
Yes, click this link to download:

Imac-n-rack-4RU_AVM_edit.skp

Also, so you can get a visual on what we do:

https://www.instagram.com/centrepiecestudiofurniture/

As a side note, having to go through the model and push/pull all the fixing holes into the components is very time consuming. I did read in another thread someone’s suggestion of integrating sub component support into the Fabber plugin so that the fixing holes could preferably remain 2D entities and thus could be moved around and repositioned very easily - especially without the need for intersecting or push/pulling the holes. All my work is custom and so the fixing positions change with every job. This would shave a lot of time off the machining prep.

#8

Thanks for posting that, I’ll take a look.

As far as the holes thing, I actually model that way to because a lot of my stuff changes around. We have sub components on the short list, but in an effort to “keep it simple” we skipped it for this first release…

Stay tuned for that one too.

#9

Do you have a version of this file, or another one that’s similar that has your sub components in them the way you like to do it?

Also, I checked out your instagram, very cool stuff you’re doing!