Post date: Jul 18, 2014 1:18:26 AM
I've got a new project called meta-gcode. It's a little program containing skeleton functions for common (at least in my world) GCode operations- such as milling out cylindrical or rectangular pockets, arcs, etc. Since I don't have a fancy CAD-CAM workflow, I tend to write GCode by hand, which gets tedious pretty quickly. Even being able to copy blocks of code (eg, the code for a cylindrical pocket) is kind of a pain, since you need to update tags (eg, "o101") on all the if/while statements.
The goal of this project is to be able to generate GCode with some sort of higher-level language- a kind of text expansion for GCode. Being able to specify a pocket to be milled by dimensions and center is much more convenient than writing the loops to mill it every single time.
Right now there's mostly just a function to mill a cylindrical pocket, plus all the helper code (linear feeds, arcs, etc.) that goes with it. Additionally, there's some concept of state- safe Z height, tool size, feed rate, etc. It should eventually include the ability to generate rectangular pockets, and then who knows what else. It's definitely not terribly useful at this point (and may never be very useful to anybody but me), but hopefully it should save [me] time and effort down the road.
GitHub repository: https://github.com/dbtayl/meta-gcode