Sandify

I am intrigued by the idea of carving some textures. I Messaged Jeff about the idea of using his sandify program to generate STL files that would be a texture. He responded
“ You could easily add some starting and endging gcode to set the speed, and dive to a few mm in Z. Then the pattern could be cut with a v bit.“.

I may have to try this. I could see this making interesting pen blanks and knife handles if I resin cast the carved surface.

Does it seem reasonable?

The zenXY is a core XY system where as the mpcnc is a Cartesian system. Is that difference handled in the firmware or g code?

The difference is in the firmware. The same gcode can make a cartesian machine draw those same shapes.

Encoding as an STL would lose the nice properties, like for example if you generated a simple spiral “pond ripple” as a 3D topographic map, the CAM would probably not trace it in a spiral shape but would instead rasterize and it wiuld not look like as nice. A guilloche pattern would be even worse.

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That would be epic. I would love to see it. I made a pen drawing with it. I added gcode to lift Z, move to the first point, drop the Z, and then set the xy speed. At the end, I just had it lift the Z.

The one tricky thing is that the start isn’t the same with each pattern, so I just exported it, saw the starting location, then exported it again with that starting location.

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