Logical Splitting of Large Carve

[jenordyke]

The nature of my controller and spindle is such that pausing a carve only pauses axis movement; the spindle continues to spin. As I am very hesitant to leave the machine running unattended, and besides would like to give both the spindle and my vac system a rest, I am looking for ways to split up large carve files into smaller carves. Is there a more elegant way to do this than my current practice of creating smaller, slightly overlapped bounding vectors and creating a file for each? With this strategy I sometimes get blemishes at the boundaries between two vector boxes.

[Rcnewcomb]

Look at adding tape splitting to a modified version of your post processor.

Tape Splitting Support
A section that describes how a long toolpath output will be split:

TAPE_SPLITTING=MAX_NUM_LINES LINE_TOL "FILENAME_FORMAT" START_INDEX INDEX_ON_FIRST_FILE

For example a command of:

TAPE_SPLITTING=1000 100 "%s_%s.tap" 1 "YES"

would lead to...

Output will be split into multiple files of a maximum of 1000 lines (+ however many lines in there are within the footer section of the post processor), if a retract move exists after line 900 (1000 – 100), the file will be split at that move. If the file was called "toolpath" the split files would be named toolpath_1.tap, toolpath_2.tap etc. The first toolpath output will be "toolpath_ 1.tap" there will be no file named "toolpath" without an index number, (as INDEX_ON_FIRST_FILE= YES is used), unless the file was less than 1000 lines long, in which case the file would not be split.

[adze_cnc]

See this post for changes needed to the above "TAPE_SPLITTING" modification.