Sandify v0.2.2
It's been just two weeks since we released 0.2.1. But it has been so fun to work on, we've got a lot of stuff in this release.
Forum Discussion
The forum post, where you can comment or ask questions is here:
https://forum.v1engineering.com/t/sandify-update-v0-2-2/17079
But, as always, feel free to post issues with bugs you find or features you think would be great.
Release Notes
These are the changes you'll see when you visit Sandify.org from now on:
L-Systems
Bob has been working on some neat new shapes based on the algorithms of L-Systems. The premise is, you write a few basic text based rules, and then recursively replace the text. At the end, you use the text to generate movements. It creates some very neat fractal patterns, and there are a lot of neat known patterns. The wikipedia article is pretty informative, and there are neat online calculators where you can try to make new ones, but Bob has picked a lot of them that work on our tables. Check them out:
Space Fillers.
These are L-System based, and have been tweaked to fill the entire surface area of your table.
Fractal Line Writer.
These are more generic L-Systems. They make some very interesting designs, especially if you are a fan of fractals. It is really interesting to me to see how they change from iteration to iteration.
Performance Improvements
These L-Systems can be pretty heavy on the calculations, and we want to keep sandify fun and fast. So we've done some additional work under the hood to reduce the number of times we recalculate the hard patterns. You should see things like the preview progress slider move a lot smoother now. Some of the shapes take a second or so to draw the first time, but are relatively quick after that.
GCode Input
We've had the .thr input for a while. The same button now will let you import .gcode and .nc files. Then you can scale the pattern to fit your machine. I hope people will find interesting patterns in sandify, or export interesting patterns from inkscape, or other CAM software and then share them. Now that we can import them, they can end up on polar tables, or just other cartesian tables.
Karltinsly has several great gcode files in his github: https://github.com/karltinsly/SandTableDesigns. Be sure to stop by the forums and give him a thumbs up.
Spiral Wiper
People have asked for this pretty often, and although it was possible to do the same thing with a circle shape, this is much easier. The Wiper tool can now do a circle. Don't forget, you can reverse this shape if you want to end up in the middle at the end of a pattern. If you have your machine limits in mm, then the Wiper Size is the distance between the lines in mm. So 12 (the default) is set to just cover everything once with a 1/2" ball.
Perimeter Optimizations
Not as flashy as some of the shapes, but it takes a lot of work to get it right. @mrehorst did it first, in a post processing perl script. But great minds think alike, and Bob also wanted this feature, so now it is part of sandify.
Basically, if the pattern goes more than halfway around the perimeter, or moves one direction, and reverses along the perimeter, the optimization removes that. The perimeter moves are not precious, and for some patterns it can reduce most of the time spent. There is also a toggle to optimize the inside elements, but take a close look at the preview first, it will do the lines in a different order.
