I'm not entirely sure if this is even possible, and the only lead I've heard thus far was not terribly promising, but I'd like to ask here to see if there is another option.
Background: We manufacture various sizes of simple custom circuitboards as a part of our business, using a router and small milling bits to etch isolation paths to create circuit traces, and drill out the holes. We previously had a small router that was specifically intended for this purpose, which used its own proprietary software. Unfortunately, its size was quite limited and it required constant babysitting to keep changing tools, so we purchased a large format CNC router that accepts standard G-Code, and it also features an automatic toolchanger.
Our in-house programming expert put together a script that converts our individual circuitboard files directly to G-Code, so we can now run jobs on this large router.
What I'm looking for: Something that can take multiple existing G-code jobs and nest them together so that we can batch a bunch of jobs at once. (Nesting in the circuitboard software takes longer than we'd like, as the software isn't really cut out to do very large boards, or nesting.)
It doesn't need to be terribly complex or snazzy, just something that can fit a bunch of G-code rectangles and their associated artwork into a predefined area, and be able to rotate them by 90° for a better fit.
So, is this something that exists in any fashion? The one lead I got said that doing something like this requires some manner of reverse-engineering software package that'd cost >$10k. I guess in my mind, it sounds like just a bunch of coordinate math - the 90° rotation functionality aside, it's just a matter of finding the size of the first job, and then taking the second job and move its origin by a certain amount, and quick sift through the text in its code to find and alter the coordinates by the necessary amount.
We'd just prefer to find and buy something now rather than have to spend the time and resources developing yet another piece of software in-house.
Thank you!
Background: We manufacture various sizes of simple custom circuitboards as a part of our business, using a router and small milling bits to etch isolation paths to create circuit traces, and drill out the holes. We previously had a small router that was specifically intended for this purpose, which used its own proprietary software. Unfortunately, its size was quite limited and it required constant babysitting to keep changing tools, so we purchased a large format CNC router that accepts standard G-Code, and it also features an automatic toolchanger.
Our in-house programming expert put together a script that converts our individual circuitboard files directly to G-Code, so we can now run jobs on this large router.
What I'm looking for: Something that can take multiple existing G-code jobs and nest them together so that we can batch a bunch of jobs at once. (Nesting in the circuitboard software takes longer than we'd like, as the software isn't really cut out to do very large boards, or nesting.)
It doesn't need to be terribly complex or snazzy, just something that can fit a bunch of G-code rectangles and their associated artwork into a predefined area, and be able to rotate them by 90° for a better fit.
So, is this something that exists in any fashion? The one lead I got said that doing something like this requires some manner of reverse-engineering software package that'd cost >$10k. I guess in my mind, it sounds like just a bunch of coordinate math - the 90° rotation functionality aside, it's just a matter of finding the size of the first job, and then taking the second job and move its origin by a certain amount, and quick sift through the text in its code to find and alter the coordinates by the necessary amount.
We'd just prefer to find and buy something now rather than have to spend the time and resources developing yet another piece of software in-house.
Thank you!
