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Can't mill down to tool size setting due to comparison error.

davidkitson
Fri, 27 Apr 2018 14:22:02 GMT

I've found what I think is a bug, and it's very annoying as it requires a workaround. To recreate, place lines so that's there's a space between them to route - If the tool size is bigger than the space, then there's no tool path generated between them. If it's smaller then the tool path is generated right? But what if the tool is exactly the same size as the gap? The correct behavior should be to generate the path, but this doesn't happen. Instead, the opposite does. As an example, if I have a 15 thou space between two tracks, and I have a 15 thou tool, then it should make a single path between the tracks - whether it traverses it twice or not. However, this doesn't work... Setting the tool to 14.9 or 14.99 or even 14.999 however works, since there's no common path then. This seems like a bug and is easy to recreate - And you can see it by making a narrow space, setting the tool size to the space size, then generating the geometry. Then set the tool size to 0.1 thou under the actual gap size and generate again, then zoom in to see how once the geometry paths merge , the path is no longer generated for the tool to follow. A "Geometry Overlap" setting would fix this and I assume could be implemented easily - with a default setting of 0.00 - or to allow two geometry paths to be the same path. Or for times when the tool size isn't perfect, this would still allow the geometry to be made with a slightly larger tool, resulting only in a slight narrowing where the paths collide, but with the geometry taking the center line between them.

davidkitson
Fri, 27 Apr 2018 14:25:24 GMT

Oh, and thanks to the developers and contributors for this great program... It really does an amazing job and makes milling PCBs so easy :) It is FlatCAM and Autoleveller0.77 that make it all come together - :)

davidkitson
Fri, 27 Apr 2018 14:30:31 GMT

[FLATCAM bug 1](//muut.com/u/flatcam/s3/:flatcam:MaWR:flatcambug1.jpg.jpg) Here's a .015 geometry and a 0.0149 geometry path in a 0.015 gap. The 0.0149 paths can be seen to move through the gap, with 0.0002 spaced parallel paths. The 0.015 path comes to an abrupt end where the two path sides converge and make a point.