Surfacing Gadget for Vectric VCarve Pro / Aspire: "The Surfinator" 1.0

[Bitandboard]

Hey friends, it’s been quite a while since I’ve had anything worthwhile to share with you all - though I do enjoy all the amazing content everyone posts. I’ve been making a bunch of cutting boards for the holidays and got tired of manually setting up all my surfacing routines. So with that (and some help from my good buddy Claude), I present to you the Surfinator 1.0:

1. Configurable total depth and depth per pass (with proper multi-pass support)
2. Automatic overshoot calculation based on tool diameter
3. Support for both fractional and decimal tool names
4. Interactive toolpath preview
5. Real-time statistics display
6. Raster direction selection (X or Y axis)
7. Settings persistence between sessions

I can confirm this runs correctly on VCare Pro 12.506, but I’ll need one of you here in the community to test for Aspire and other versions. Don’t forget to change the file extension from .zip to .vgadget

Happy Holidays!

-Bill-

The SURFINATOR v.1.0.zip (375.3 KB)

[Eric]

This looks awesome! I took it for a quick spin… First thing I ran into was that on my PC it was REALLY small:

After that I was able to make a toolpath very easily. THANK you for making the generated toolpath editable! Some gadgets don’t allow the created toopath to be edited. The approach you took here where it creates the geometry and then makes the toolpath is correct in my opinion.

This is great too as it works in Aspire so you can use whatever post processor you want..

I made it so that vgadget files can now be attached to posts.

[Bitandboard]

Hey Eric, thanks for the feedback and the confirmaton that you can use in Aspire. I’m glad that you find this useful.

-Bill-

[Eric]

No problem! It’s a cool tool. I like that the dialog for entering information is colorful and easy to read (aside from being a bit tiny! )

. Is that a web dialog or something else?

[JtheB]

This frickin’ rocks Bill!

Beats the heck out of my generic Surfacing.crv3d file.

Thanks for the effort.

J

[Bitandboard]

Thanks! I’m glad that you are finding this useful.

[Bitandboard]

Hey Eric, yes the front end is just HTML & a little javascript + the LUA file. Their plugin format is just a .zip file with the .vgadget extention so you can get in to check out the files if you’re interested in playing wiht the code.

Is there a way to run a poll on the site? It would be cool to run an informal pole to see what other kind of tools/automations for Vectric the Avid community might be interested in. Using Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 for coding made writing this gadget a pretty light lift.

-Bill-

[Eric]

You can!

[Onawa220]

Interesting output on my part. I selected a smaller project I’m working on. Using the RC-2255 2” cutter on a 197mmX306mm size project it shows it would take 4 hours and 16 min. I THINK it may be thinking it’s in inches and not MM but even then at 300 IPM it should be done in a very short time.