Minimizing tool air-time
For a CAM software I wrote, intended for milling foam sheets, I needed a way to improve machining time, so once the feed rates are raised to the limit, the next step is to reduce any wasted time. On an initial approach, our tool was finishing parts one after the other, so there was a bit of the tool going back and forth within the same part. While it may seem the whole problem is like a big TSP (travelling salesman problem) and the way to optimize the used time is to connect all the dots with the shortest possible path, it is not exactly so. On a milling operation, the tool path has been carefully calculated so it will remove the proper amount of material by following a certain path. Changing such a path will alter the finish of the part and we do not want to go there. So what we really have is something like two different sets of movements, one that corresponds to the actual cutting operations and a second one that moves the tool over the air to start a new cutting operation....