So I just want to broach this idea. We have a laser with a pass through front to back. However, to cut something larger than the bed, we would have to segment out our design into the “pieces” as we pass it through.
What about having the ability to have a design that is larger than the bed, but draw a rectangle that is your cut area and where the cut area is, only the segments inside of the cut area are sent to the laser. So the rectangle itself would not be cut obviously - it would be a guide to show you what is getting cut.
Again, the use case for us is large acrylic shields where a single shield is longer than the bed. FYI we’re using a laser that has a 4’ wide pass-through, can cut about 51" wide and 35" tall. So on a 4x8 sheet, if we are using the whole sheet, I’d have 3 files. And truthfully, I have more than that because if it’s a full width cut, I just align it and so the full 4’ cut and then continue with the rest of the cut.
This could be a really cool feature to integrate with the camera as well so that you are just moving the design under the cut area rectangle.
And I don’t want to go crazy but once I was thinking about a map on a round cutout. In this case the bounding cut shape would be a circle, not a rectangle.
Alternative: In Illustrator and other drawing tools, you can use a rectangle to “clip” other things. (Not sure that clip is the right word as the full drawing is kept, but only the part inside the rectangle is shown.) This may serve the purpose.
Something I am surprised to have not seen used is the U axis on Ruida controllers. It is designed to be used for feeding (fabric I think is the example I remember being referenced). But I always think of feeding as a large feeder table.
With a feeder table concept in mind, I imagine a large sheet of material set upon a bed having bearing rollers supporting the material and a motorized in feed / out feed controlled by U.
So using your box reference mentioned, the concept would be the boundaries negativity or positivity beyond the X or Y axis (which ever it may be on a particular machine body’s pass through), would span the entirety of the project and with feeding enabled, similar to a Z move, once the work in the mechanical limit of the machine is complete, feeding would move the material appropriately and the job would continue and complete that next frame.
TopWisdom controllers will do this apparently, though I’m not sure how much is hardware and how much is software. I haven’t played with the option yet.
