generate HPGL milling data
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#25 generate HPGL milling data
A nice feature for gerbv involving clever algorithms would be the ability
to create outlines suitable for milling PCBs with CNC machines.
There are a few Windows based alternatives but none of them is free.
One that I like is ISOCAM available as a demo at http://www.megauk.
com/downloads.shtml
The Eagle package which is available for Linux has a script
(mill-outlines.ulp) which creates milling files. Unfortunatelly you have to
create your whole design in Eagle and you can't process other Gerber
files.
For milling you'll have to generate the outlines of every elementary
shape in the Gerber file placed at a fixed distance (which is half of the
milling tool diameter). Then you'll have to remove all the outlining
segments which intersect a Gerber object shape.
Another algorithm could be to mirror every shape and then intersect
all the mirror polygones. The resulting intersection shapes can be
then outlined with an offset inwards.
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After some more reading it seams that the algorithm for generating
vectorised outlines is based on the Voronoi diagrams:
http://www.cs.uu.nl/geobook/voronoi.ps
Someone started to write a Java applet to generate G-codes (for CNC
machines) from Gerber input using Voronoi diagrams:
http://www.mit.edu/~vona/Visolate-info.html