Is there anybody else seriously using VB to program the G code they need?

[black5f]

Hi.
You've been busy? cracking stuff!
Not sure where to post this but here seems as good as any. So to set my stall out so to speak, having already shared some vector geometry (maths is definately NOT subject to copyright!). You may be interested in this as well Jonathan? This is not a show off, you asked to share routines and it seems my place is to pass this on to whoever has the attention span to listen. I have dug this out. A lot of modern CAD owes it's roots to efforts by several people to produce ways of representing shoe making tooling, patterns and lasts (the foot form tool) on a computer. This was done by the application of pure maths and checking the dates on the files I last edited these in 1989. I never junk source and this has been copied religiously from 720k beer mats to modern day servers. It runs in dos and after a little work, not only ran in dosbox on an XP machine but I even found the compiler! It compiles to an exe file of only 645k! Written in pascal, a very readable langage, all pure maths, no third party dlls, we had to do it scratch then. The lasts are made form manually digitised point clouds, points interpolated to give a network of csplines ( cubic, degree 3 equations). These form the boundaries of parametric bicubic patches, their bounderies constrained to be smooth with adjacent patches in tangent and curvature. The shading was done by reprogramming the pallete (only 256 colours in those days and VGA was advanced graphics) and colours assigned based on the angle of the normal to the surface vs the angle of the light source (very relevant to tool paths). The crossections are equations in themselves, the intersection of the surface and a plane. So not individual points as such, like a wire frame, but mathematical equations. Maybe one day I'll recode it in Delphi 7, my standard stable 21st centurary tool of choice. Right now I'm too busy on other stuff, steam engines etc. Anyway, food for thought.