ToDo

This page lists new ideas for opencamlib or ideas for improvement. Not necessarily in any order of importance or difficulty.

1. Allow different triangle-overlap-search algorithms

• now we always use a kd-tree, but simple bucketing might be faster?
• used in all dropCutter and pushCutter algorithms: BatchDropCutter, PathDropCutter etc.

2. Cutter-location-surface (mesh).

• Start with a 2D area, a polygon (which may have holes)
• Triangulate the polygon (use Triangle, OpenVoronoi or similar for a Delaunay triangulation)
• Use Drop-cutter to set the Z-coordinate of each mesh-vertex
• Refine the mesh to desired accuracy (Use triangle side-length, area, z-difference, etc. for subdivision predicates)

3. Use cutter-location-surface for constant-scallop and pencil-milling

• constant-scallop paths are geodesics on the cutter-location-surface
• pencil-milling paths follow abrupt changes in the contact normal of the cutter-location-surface

4. Geodesics on meshes

• Bommes & Kobbelt paper: http://www-i8.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/uploads/media/bommes_07_VMV_01.pdf
• recent Xin paper: DOI: 10.1016/j.cad.2011.08.027 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cad.2011.08.027

5. (constrained-)Delaunay triangulations (Anglada paper in References)
6. Cutting-simulation work:

• Dual contouring ( Ju paper: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=566586 )
• Exact intersections and normals for octree & cutters
• Color by cutter used
• Cutter engagement area & material removal rate
• work with emc2 G-code interpreter

7. Make adaptive sampling an (default?) option for dropCutter and Waterline

• now we have PathDropCutter (uniform sampling) and a sub-class AdaptivePathDropCutter (adaptive sampling). It would be better to have just one operation-class and uniform/adaptive sampling as an option.

8. Resolve problems with Waterline

• pushCutter creates topologically incorrect Weave:s which cannot be processed by Weve::build()

Done

2. (minor change) Use brent's root finding algorithm TOMS748 from boost, not our own. This is used in edgePush and edgeDrop of BullCutter.

• http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_47_0/libs/math/doc/sf_and_dist/html/math_toolkit/toolkit/internals1/roots2.html

3. This is now the OpenVoronoi project: Voronoi diagrams for line-segment and arc generators

• inCircle predicate: when is a voronoi-vertex closest to a line/arc ?
• voronoi-vertex positioning: based on three generators, position vertex (at intersection of bisectors)
• bisector-factory. Based on two neighboring generators, return an edge (line, parabola, ellipse, hyperbola).