Most tool vendors produce tool tables for users to download, which helps sell their products.
I spent some time working on a tool to convert Tool Manufacturers files into a format that MillMage can use. In doing so, I went through a few iterations, and realizations. Initially, the the tool was designed to import tool tables in the following formats: Fusion 360m Carbide Create, Vectrix, CarevCo and of course, MillMage
Once a tool table was imported, we can edit the table and adjust various parameters. And after editing, we can save it back to the same table, or to another.
But, if you look at these tool tables, it gets overwhelming large, and most of us probably use less than 20 tools. So the next step was allowing us to merge tools from the vendors converted table to the one used by MillMage. We did this with this screen.
This allows the user to move over only the tools that they use from the Vendors file over to his local file.
I wrote this a few months ago, then I had travel, a funeral, malaise and other things in my way. When I went back to study the files, I realized that most tool vendors produce files in a few formats, and most of them always produced a Fusion 360 formatted file. So I concentrated efforts on that one, though the other ones works as well.
Fusion 360 is probably the simplest one, as it is a Json formatted file. I write in Java, but it is easily translatable to C++ of course. Json processing is very similar between the two. There are a few “iffies” in the code, and I would need some help testing and working out idiosyncrasies, but I have been using the IDC file in my testing. Any interest for anybody?
