[TronCarter]

I have a 10+ year old piece of software that is for circuit board layout. One of the things it will do is export a .dxf file and then it can be used for programming a cnc mill to drill the holes in the board for you. I am able to get everything to work except that the holes are drilled in the order in which they were drawn and consequently the mill does a lot of unnecessary traveling, jumping from hole to hole instead of doing it in a "shortest path" method. The circuit board layout software is limited in that there is no way to "reorder" the holes once drawn. Is there a piece of software that can work with a .dxf and rearrange it for a "shortest path"?

[TOTALLYRC]

I have a 10+ year old piece of software that is for circuit board layout. One of the things it will do is export a .dxf file and then it can be used for programming a cnc mill to drill the holes in the board for you. I am able to get everything to work except that the holes are drilled in the order in which they were drawn and consequently the mill does a lot of unnecessary traveling, jumping from hole to hole instead of doing it in a "shortest path" method. The circuit board layout software is limited in that there is no way to "reorder" the holes once drawn. Is there a piece of software that can work with a .dxf and rearrange it for a "shortest path"?

I assume most cam software can but that might be a large assumtion.
I use deskcnc both as a machine controller and it's CAM feature to do my tool path generation/G-code. Before doing anything with the dxf, the first thing I do is turn on show information tags and then go to set machining order.
Yes it has to be done manually, but it works for me. If you have 100 holes to reorder, it gets crazy, but I will assume that one of the higher end packages will do it automatically.

They have a trail download if you want to give it a try.

www.deskcnc.com

Mike

[HuFlungDung]

OneCNC has a sort function for holes, it may be able to do what you need. Although it's feature recognition will sort full arcs into groups automatically, if you place points at all arc centers, then it will drill by points only, in which case it should sort the whole group. If you want to post an nc file or a dxf, I'll run it through and send you back the results.

[mc-motorsports]

I use Rhino, and if you just use the "hole select" command, yes, sometimes it can be random. But if you select your regions in the order that you want they drilled or cut, than that's the order the machine goes in.

Guess it depends on what CAM system your using. So... What CAM system are you using?

[TronCarter]

It is also quite old and I think proprietary to the Milltronics Mill that we have at work. It runs a software called SLS. I know it can't be done with SLS, that's why I was hoping there was a way to rearrange the dxf file. Currently the process is to create the drawing in a CAD program or in this case my circuit board creator, and then it can be imported by SLS. SLS automatically figures out the toolpaths for you and there is no easy way to rearrange the holes. From what my tests have shown it appears that SLS will machine them in the order in which they were drawn by the CAD program which would make some sense if my understanding of dxf files are correct in that it is simply a text file that is probably generated in the order in which the part was drawn. The circuit board I am currently working on has 526 holes on it so it does not lend itself to manually rearranging the holes or hand drilling.

[rapidtraverse]

A last resort could be to cut and paste

[BMG]

Do you have AutoCAD?

If so - use Gery's AC2GC application. search the site for it and you should find a link to it.

I use that for generating my Gcode. He has built in several picking options for cutting. One is Order drawn or User Selected Order. I use this routinely. It gets tedious for picking large groups of entities, but you can always pick subsets of entities then append the resulting GCODE files together afterwords.

If the Milltronics wants a DXF file (probably R12 or earlier) then you will need to manipulate it either by hand (text file editing - not for the feint of heart) or with AutoCAD, Intellicad, or similar program.

[BMG]

After thinking about this more, if you or someone you work with is decent with a programming language, you could;

parse the DXF file into a table
grab all the entities (have to figure out if the par points, lines, polylines, etc...)
order the entities either using a nearest neighbor routine or x.y sort
parse the reorganized entity list back to a revised dxf

and your done. Of course this is dependent upon someone writing the program to do it.

For reference, here is the file structure reference for DXF's from AutoCAD.

http://www.autodesk.com/techpubs/aut...les_dxf_aa.htm

HTHs