[SomeWhatLost]

so while I am sitting around waiting for my PCNC1100 to show up:banana:
I decided to put my little fireball v90 back together from its previous exploded state (aka, the reason why I started looking for a 'bench top' cnc mill in the first place, little cnc routers made out of fiberboard & PVC can only do so much before exploding... who would of guessed?)

so anyway, after patching up my little fireball, and updating mach to the latest & greatest(?), I downloaded tormach's Mach CNC scanner pluggin, hooked up a cheesy $30 usb microscope, routed out a little cheesy fireball usb microscope mount, and started scanning stuff...

it actually works really well... there were some hiccups in the beginning do to me having the cheesy microscope rotated the wrong way... but all is well now...

my question is, with the unlicensed cnc scanner cad thingy, what next? ie I get pretty pictures and all, but what can you do with them? how do I get the .TSI output file into alibre? where I can then trace it? the scanner cad thingy wont let me save to a normal file, actually it wont let me save at all since it is unlicensed... but I really don't want to license it... I don't want to do CAD type stuff on my mill/router, I have a nice comfy chair in my office and a killer PC to do cad stuff on...and my office is more closer to the fridge that contains the beer... beer is a very important part of cad, possibly the most important cad tool... at least from my point of view...

[WOTDesigns]

I cant answer your question, but I like the way you cad. Personally I prefer my laptop with Kinsington expert mouse on my la-z-boy watching modern marvels with an IPA

[Knires]

You won't get anything useful from the unlicensed version. With the licensed version I've got, you can trace the picture you got and output it to a .dxf file for use in cad/cam.

You may be able to take a screenshot of the picture onto a plane in cad and trace it in Alibre if Alibre allows for that sort of thing. I don't know if Alibre does, I typically use Solidworks of NX at my job. Before the cnc scanner software was able to do splines, that is what I did (in Solidworks).

I do reccommend the actual licensed version though. It is easy to use and does the job as accurately as I need.

[SomeWhatLost]

It is easy to use and does the job as accurately as I need.

yes, it is could be quite useful I would think, and it is easy to use...
just tormach's online video made the unlicensed version seem much more useful...