I have a small part I need to cut 60 pieces, and I have a bunch of different sized stock I want to use up. This caused me to go looking for nesting optimization software and I found a little gem I thought I would share. It’s free: https://deepnest.io/
-Jeff
I wonder about their business model. Neither beer nor speech is free…
@jwoody18 Jeff: It looks good. Thanks. I’m going to try it on some old files. One thing to keep in mind, I think, is that it is made for laser cutters. It says that it merges the common lines of parts. We would need to consider the diameter of our bit and leave room between parts.
Jeff, thanks for reminding me about this one. The last time I saw it it was web based and could only do SVGs. They’ve come a long way.
How did it do one your 60-part run? Did it arrange things efficiently on your stock?
I saw that at first and was worried, but in the settings (cog) menu you can specify a spacing between parts, I’ve been playing with 19mm and down. It isn’t quite clear to me whether or not it respects that distance between the outer edge of the stock and the part or not, some of them appear quite close to my eye.
Bill,
I’m afraid I haven’t had a chance to run any of the work yet. I’m going to need to cut a new piece of spoil board and probably raise up my Longmill so I can put the new board in and add some dogholes to allow me to align things perfectly as some of the cuts don’t have much space to spare given how tightly I need to pack them to get the pieces out of my stock.
I’ve also been slowed by the fact that I seem to only have enough stock to get 50 of the 60 I need. I was going to wait until I got more, but then I realized that would be a waste of the CNC. Since it’s the same part over and over I can continue along with the other parts and build and get the remaining parts in the next week or so, so hopefully tomorrow or Tuesday I can get to cutting. Also got distracted making a field case/rifle stand for my father-in-law, but we ran out of time so that’s awaiting a final carve of the side skins (want to put his former military unit logo on it for him) and then assembly… Gah too many 80% completed projects piling up!
Anyway, the project with lots of pieces is this one - going to surprise my wife with my own version of this lovely design for a sun lounger: https://www.youtube.co/watch?v=KcQSi14sYKQ
-Jeff
I’ve always wondered about that expression myself, but I’ve convinced myself that they mean free as in asking your college buddies to help you move in exchange for some beer…
Jeff, once I figured out that you have to make one file with all your parts, including the stock, it worked really well. It has quite a few more options than the web version. One thing I really like is that it will put parts inside other parts if you let it, so all that material that would normally be wasted is used more efficiently. Thanks again for the reminder.
Bill