I am working away on more of the geometric intersection algorithms. I seem to keep getting distracted by exciting optimizations and improvements in other things. You will see more of that in the coming days. This should be exciting work though.
But the great news that I want to pass along is that Wildcat now has its first contributor outside of myself. I would like to welcome Dan Heeks to the team. He has decided to help add support for integrated-GPU platforms (i.e. GL earlier than 1.5) and to begin adding GUI support via wxWidgets. Both of these improvements are highly anticipated and I really welcome the support.
Dan is also working on a couple of projects of his own. The most notable is one that I hope we can eventually integrate with Wildcat. HeeksCNC is his open source CAM software. He blogs about it here and code is available here. Check it out! And thanks for joining Dan. Its good to have some help.
More soon. Cheers,
G
2 comments:
Graham, Dan,
Sounds good! We really need to collaborate on these things to get anything done in a reasonable time.
Some of the cutter-location ideas I was thinking about now got written up in Python by Lode Leroy and published on sourceforge:
http://pycam.wiki.sourceforge.net/
For 3-axis 3D machining the basic drop-cutter and push-cutter algorithms are the ones needed first, then a lot of high-level stuff builds on these.
If there is a working windows or Linux/Ubuntu version of wildcat-cad in the near future then I promise to try to help!
regards,
Anders
Anders,
I agree, helping each other is what open source software is all about.
I was hoping to see if I could take any good ideas from Wildcat for my own project, but I couldn't get it to run without crashing, so I have started fixing it.
The problem is that my computer only supports OpenGL 1.4, which is old and Graham has used many new fast OpenGL functions.
I have put about 1 day of work into this and it now runs on my computer for simple tests. I am learning a lot about the new ( ten years probably! ) OpenGL functions from working with Graham's code.
I am impressed with Graham's code, so I think his project deserves some more of my effort. I am good at writing old simple OpenGL ( it's the only OpenGL I know ). Also, I have now had some experience with wxWidgets and I like it, so I am going to make a wxWidgets project for Wildcat that will build on Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Express ( which is free ). This should then be possible to convert to Ubuntu.
Maybe I will be able to use Wildcat's solid modelling instead of the Open CASCADE that is in my project eventually.
See my blog heekscnc.blogspot.com. I have added a post showing how the code you gave me is used in my project.
Post a Comment