Well the paper cutter that I have access too is a Pazzles Inspiration. Interesting machine. I’m looking forward to playing with it a bit.
The Inspiration uses a WPC file format. I downloaded a file off the net to peek into it. I was hoping that it might something like G-code or DXF but unfortunately no such luck. It’s a binary ;(.
I opened it up in hexedit and I can see patterns in the data, but it’s not worth it to me to figure out how to write directly to a WPC. Supposedly the Middleware can convert various file formats to WPC. Over labor day I’m visiting, so I’m planning on checking this out and giving it a whirl.
Now…. Since I’m rather partial to opensource linux stuff, I trying to figure out some software that I can use for my little project here. I downloaded and compiled the source for Heekscad yesterday night. Darn that stuff is starting to look nice. I was really pleased to see that you can now choose either metric or inch. (Yepp I’m one of those backward inch folks)
What to do here… I do want to learn Blender but the 2.4 front end has a steep learning curve. 2.5* is still in alpha according to http://www.blender.org/development/ . Poor life timing for me since Blender seems well suited and has been used quite a bit for Paper Engineering as well as developing some models for a 3d game I’ve been wanting to write for my daughter… (Probably be a teenager by the time I get to that ;(.
I really should start trying to use heekscad. So many of my interests converge with this application. I suppose as a first step I need to see if I can export a sketch to a DXF and see if I can get it imported into Pazzle software and convert it to a DXF.
Ok… I think I have my next steps defined
- use heekscad to generate sketch
- see if we can gets something saved in DXF
- if it looks good, watch the tutorial on solver (link somewhere on the reprap group)
- make a Pop-Up box (2d flat)
- Export to DXF
- See if we can get it to convert to WPC
- attempt a cut-out