[Tony Mac]

While talking with a VCarve Pro customer who was asking why
his toolpaths were all point-to-point moves, I realised that
we hadn't fully promoted or explained the usefulness and power
of the new Arc Fitting tool available in version 5 Aspire 2.

After explaining how the Arc fitting would improve his 2D
profiling and pocketing toolpaths. The customer experimented
with the Arc fitting and was amazed to find out that the toolpaths
were significantly smaller around 1/4 of the original size of the
bezier based toolpaths and his CNC machine is running much
smoother.

To get a feel for the results obtained by using the Arc fitting
tool, I tested the option using the Velocette example show below.

After Vectrorizing / Tracing the original jpg image of the logo,
the resulting vectors were all bezier curves and lines.

I then created a new layer and copied the original bezier vectors
onto this layer. Using the Arc Fitting Tool, the beziers were
converted to Arcs using a tolerance = 0.005" / 0.1mm.

Calculating toolpaths using the two sets of vectors gave the
following results,

Pocket - Bezier Toolpath = 22,156 lines of CNC code
Pocket - Arcs Toolpath = 4,408 lines of CNC code

Profile - Bezier Toolpath = 2,670 lines of CNC code
Profile - Arc Toolpath = 387 lines of CNC code

Very impressive reductions in the file sizes when using a postprocessor
that outputs G2 / G3 Arc moves + the some machines will also run much
smoother using the arc based CNC code.

Note - Converting geometry to Arcs will significantly reduce the file sizes
of 2D toolpaths, but will not have change the VCarving or 3D engraving
toolpaths as these have to be point-to-point simultaneous XYZ moves.

I hope this might be of interest to other users and let me know if you
have any questions.

Tony