kallaballa / ctrl-cut

Get your laser cutter under control

Laser cutter driver and control panel

Ctrl-Cut is an initiative to produce Open Source toolchain for talking to laser cutters without being restricted to proprietary drivers and the chosen operating system of the laser cutter vendor.

Initially, this is targetted Epilog laser cutters.

Laser cutters from Epilog are fantastic devices. Unfortunately, Epilog forces us to use their Microsoft Windows-only laser cutter drivers. In addition, they only support Corel Draw as an application from which you can run jobs (other tools might work but are not supported).

There are also multiple other shortcomings of the Epilog drivers, which we will elaborate on later.

To remedy this, we are writing our own drivers, which will run on both Linux and Mac OS X (and any other system supporting CUPS).

Currently, we only support Epilog Legend 36EXT, but we aim to support other backends as well.

Please get in touch if you want to help out by developing, testing, documenting or supplying information about other laser cutters.

Packages

https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3Aelchaschab&package=ctrl-cut

License

GPL V2 (or later)

Contact

Amir Hassan: [email protected]

Marius Kintel: [email protected]

ctrl-cut's Issues

Document title should be synced with filename unless set specifically

This just makes sense

Save default document settings in a rc file

Show properties doesn't work correclty

you need to click it several times to hide something and it doesnt hide the dockwidget

Translate doesn't reset the position to zero

When you open the metalab test case and show the preview you'll see that the cut position is off.

There is no option to configure auto focus

Copy and Paste doesn't actually work

It looks like it works in the gui, but when we save it seems like the copy has the exact settings of the original no matter what modifications where done.

Make editing of spinboxes more sensible

Doing a single edit (one key stroke) in a qspinbox will emit valueChange and the component loses the focus.
Instead it should wait for either the return key being hit or for lost focus before commiting the change.

make pasted items selected

When opening a file, zoom to view all

PNG import

Correct tab ordering of GUI elements

The property GUI has wrong tab ordering, making keyboard usage annoying.
Related to #7 in that they both deal with keyboard usage of the GUI

JPEG import

Save doesn't automatically add the file extension

Color code cutting parameters

When objects in the scene has different cutting parameters, render them with different colors to highlight these differences.

Implement a preview

Show the user how the document looks like after optimization.

on send let the user enter the ip address

Don't show New Job dialog when opening file

A few cases:

• Pass .cut filename on the command-line: Should just open the file
• Drag&Drop or double-click .cut filename while New Job dialog is open: Open file and close dialog
• Double-click to open file: Just open file

please consider using "GPLv2 (or later)"

To make it compatible with GPLv3 software it would be good to use the "(or later)" term when describing this software licencing terms.

On startup configuration

On startup ask for the laser model, the target resolution and the bed/material size.

Recent files menu

..for quick access to (10 or so) recently opened documents

Feature: Add an object list view

It would be nice to have a list view showing all added objects, a bit like the layer view in QCad:

• show filenames per object
• Enable show/hide
• Selection
• Delete
• Show color code for cutter parameters?

The idea would be to set up an QAbstractTableModel and a corresponding selection model, and sync these bidirectionally to the QGraphicsScene.
This might not be trivial:

• http://invalidmagic.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/qgraphicsscene-used-as-a-qabstractitemview-iii/
• http://www.progtown.com/topic1904410-qgraphicsscene-qtableview.html

ObjectPropertyWidget crashes on unit change

Kuratowski graph found in make planar

That means the explode somehow failes, because the cut still forms a graph the can't be layout in a straight line drawing (which shouldn't happen without any intersecting segments).

Test through all sort options for the best

Make an option available to automatically test through all sort options and find the one the generates the shortest route.

GUI: Second save removes window title

Only tested on Mac:

If I save the same file twice, the window title is removed on the second save:

Theres no configuration for the reduce parameter

CutItems auto close polygons

When loading the minimal test case test-data/gui/closing_polygon/closing_polygon.svg in the gui somehow the polygon ends up closed.

Put the ctrlcut version into cut file and the rc file

Add rulers

Add rulers to the edges of the main window, to better get a feel for object dimensions

Don't crash when opening corrupt .cut files

When opening a corrupt or partial .cut file, we currently bail and let the process crash.
e.g. on Mac:

libc++abi.dylib: terminating with uncaught exception of type xmlpp::parse_error: Document not well-formed.
Line 10, column 5 (fatal):
Extra content at the end of the document

Abort trap: 6

We should be more robust and offer an error message.

Clean up compiler warnings

clang spews out a huge amount of warnings when building, making it hard to see errors.
Clean up warnings test with both clang and gcc.

create a progress dialog for job sending

OS X: Support opening app by double-click

This includes drag & drop to the app icon.

Autofocus isn't saved in cut file

implement cancelation for sending

Object grouping

Implement grouping properly:

• Handle group selections similarly as multi-selection (blocked by #11)
• Save grouping to .cut files
• Preserve grouping when opening .cut files
• auto-group combined vector/raster imports ?

The license header is out of date

do we really have to put it into every single file?

Implement object scaling, rotation and mirroring

• For scaling, add option to proportionally scale
• For rotation, add shortcuts for 90 degrees rotation
• Mirror across vertical or horizontal center axis

show error message if startup config can't be loaded or saved

report connection issues on send

DocumentHolder leak on redo

in function CtrlCutUndo::redo a new DocumentHolder is allocated but never deleted. use shared pointers to fix the problem

DXF import

AbstractCtrlCutItem::clone doesn't clone

AbstractCtrlCutItem::clone should return a deep copy. at the moment it only copies pointers to items.
This bug prevents copy & paste from working

Copy/Paste settings

We need an easy way of copying and pasting selection from on object to the next.
Suggestion: Add two Edit menu items:

• Copy Settings
• Paste Settings

This is pretty common for things like font style in drawing software.

Action file quit is missing

after all not everybody has window decoration.

Adjust line width for high-DPI displays

Line width of rendering should be adjusted for high-DPI displays. Right now, the lines are rendered so thin that they're barely visible

Improve rectangle selection

QGraphicsView supports basic rubber band selection, but it's limited:

• Extending an existing selection doesn't work
• It looks like it uses bounding box selection as default. Not sure if this can be extended

When importing many objects, rectangle selection would be convenient.
If we do this, QCad's selection style would be cool:

• Drag from left to right: select objects fully inside the drag rectangle
• Frag from right to left: select objects partially inside the drag rectangle

Multiselection doesn't handle object properties correctly

when doing a multiselect the objectpropertywidget shows the (editable) settings of the first selected item. it should only show the x and y pos and update the settings of all items involved.

CtrlCutUndo doesn't work anymore

implement undo/redo for each of the commands seperately

Cuts need to be merged before optimization

otherwise optimizations become ineffective since they only cannot operate globally