After more than a little frustration with FreeCAD over the weekend, I was finally able to pin my woes down to a couple of things:
- My drawing had a defect that was not noticeable until you tried to to run the CNC.
- FreeCAD didn't handle the Tag dressup very well. This may be a bug, or yet another artifact of #3
- I still don't know what I'm doing.
The latter is definitely an issue - generally, I suggest people pick something small and simple when learning new technology - like "Hello World". Not me - I dove in and started with a complex layout that wouldn't fit on a single sheet of plywood, which necessitated splitting up the drawing in ways that are not normally done. "That's not generally something I'd contemplate" - advice from someone who is supposed to be a CAD guru...
And at the end of the day, I generated sawdust. You can see the outline on the right - that's the top of the side panel at the rear hatch. Wait... why does it drop 1" at the end of the curve?? (It shouldn't).
Fortunately, or irrelevantly, it didn't matter. Somehow the depth was incorrect, so it only cut the first layer of veneer. (never commit gcode on a Saturdayy night at 2300 after working on the problem for 12 hours. I really, really should know better...)
So back to the debug tree, and I *still* don't know why it thinks one of the panels is .4 inches tall, but I learned how to enforce the boundaries, and it's now all on the correct plane - and Yep, I read the gcode itself to verify that!
Off to the shop now to try again. Hopefully the next post is a set of panels instead of more expensive sawdust!!!
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