Ski Builders Forum

Thanks Rich am going to give it a mother shot on my flight home over the weekend. Ill let you know how it goes.

Not to crash the thread here, but can anyone explain how this software is better or significantly different than boardcrafter?- aside from not costing 15 bucks.
I look at many of the parameters listed by mike previously and I dont see many differences.

MontuckyMadman wrote:Not to crash the thread here, but can anyone explain how this software is better or significantly different than boardcrafter?- aside from not costing 15 bucks.
I look at many of the parameters listed by mike previously and I dont see many differences.

Its a lot more than just CAD, thats the difference. Of course most board and ski programs will typically have waist width, tip and tail length and sidecut radius etc etc, and they spit of pdf and dxf. Thats all good but then you have to process it through CAM to get it ready for your CNC.

I've not looked at Boardcrafter too hard but afaik it does not output the g code and I imagine you need to creat specific drawings for each element such as sidewall rebates and edge rabbet and drilling pattern etc and then CAM each one too, so this must take a reasonable amount of time per design.

MonkeyCAM lets you design the same as the other programs but spits out the G-code in seconds literally, and in a format that suits a typical board building process in fact basically helps you with the 9 different g-code files to cut the core and drill it and profile and edge rabbet it and cut side wall trenches etc etc, cut tip spacer to match, alignment dowels the works.

Mike can spell this out better than I can since he's been developing and using MonkeyCAM for 10+ years, but I can see big time saving wins for a start and it works in with a good board building process.

Try it MM see if it works for you, I'm convinced its for me , in time I will familiarise myself with vCarve or something similar to do some CAM processing, and I'll spend time skilling up on CAD, but for now I want to build boards and MonkeyCAM does that very nicely, with future development it will do more too.

cheers
Rich

Yeah I here ya richie. I already have a very complex and solid cam solution so I guess I was only looking at the cad part and feeling it was lacking some stuff like boardcrafter.
Curentlt the monkey setup is a comand path setup? Not for me until it has a real time inteface and im pc not mac ever so maybe once this is a downloadable real time display cad:cam solution I can spend some time with it.

MontuckyMadman wrote:Yeah I here ya richie. I already have a very complex and solid cam solution so I guess I was only looking at the cad part and feeling it was lacking some stuff like boardcrafter.
Curentlt the monkey setup is a comand path setup? Not for me until it has a real time inteface and im pc not mac ever so maybe once this is a downloadable real time display cad:cam solution I can spend some time with it.

Yeah sounds like you have it sorted MM but in time this may be a valuable tool for you to consider when it develops more, even for quick prototyping maybe since you have your current systems dialled.

The GUI is coming, the older MonkeyCAM had one but Mike was keen to start from scratch, hence we have started a project to get SnoCAD GUI and MonkeyCAM working together. Mike has started on open sourcing SnoCAD with Dan Graf generously allowing the source code to be open source licensed so first steps, Mike will do a SnoCAD release that is a refresh of the current really, at some stage when he's got time, and then after that the next plan I believe is to get it to output to MonkeyCAM which means a little more clever stuff....... way beyond me its clever stuff these programmers do.

It is going to be compiled for both MAC and PC so you'll be able to use it.

I'm a bit of a GUI interface fan myself however the MonkeyCAM command line is actually very good and it instantly spits out the g-code and the 1 page html file overview is also very useful.

Back Again and I am still having difficulty. I will post the same problem on Github shortly after this post. If someone could tell me what I am doing wrong that would be great. Because right now I have a cmc mogul that is in need of some use.

So I read through the thread and the documentation on github and believe I have followed the direction (obviously not). After downloading the .dmg file I then took the folder and put it into a folder I created on my desktop called MonkeyCam. After that I opened the terminal and pasted the code that github provided.

cd <directory where you copied the dmg contents>
mkdir SampleBoard
bin/MonkeyCAM --board example/board-def.json --machine example/machine-tool-def.json --outdir SampleBoard
open Sample-output/Sample-snowboard-overview.html

Changing <directory where you copied the dmg contents> to

cd <MonkeyCam>
mkdir SampleBoard
bin/MonkeyCAM --board example/board-def.json --machine example/machine-tool-def.json --outdir SampleBoard
open Sample-output/Sample-snowboard-overview.html

this did not work. I then took all the files out of their folders so they were just sitting in the MonkeyCam folder. and posted the code again and it did not work. When I opened the terming all I did was post the code. Are there other inputs that I need to put in before I post the code?

What am I doing wrong?


thanks for the help!

Not a Mac user, however this looks like you need to insert the full path to the directory not just the name of it. You could try inserting "~/Desktop/MonkeyCam/" (without the quotation marks). The "~" can usually replace the filepath to your home directory where your desktop is located.

chrismp wrote:Not a Mac user, however this looks like you need to insert the full path to the directory not just the name of it. You could try inserting "~/Desktop/MonkeyCam/" (without the quotation marks). The "~" can usually replace the filepath to your home directory where your desktop is located.

Hi Mike,

As per the message I sent on GitHub lets set up a Skype screen sharing session and I'll help you through getting it going, you should be fine after that to experiment with some trial designs and create some gcode for your cnc!

cheers
Rich

Hey Guys - was testing this out and wondering if there is a quick solution for my problem. Basically my X axis is the short one at around 22", the Y axis is longer at around 84". This software uses the ski setup on its side (vs. on its tail) so when i load the toolpath code into mach3 the ski goes off my table. Any easy way to change all of the toolpaths so its rotated 90?

switzch wrote:Hey Guys - was testing this out and wondering if there is a quick solution for my problem. Basically my X axis is the short one at around 22", the Y axis is longer at around 84". This software uses the ski setup on its side (vs. on its tail) so when i load the toolpath code into mach3 the ski goes off my table. Any easy way to change all of the toolpaths so its rotated 90?

in my own way I could only suggest the following......

using a decent text editor

find/replace all "Y" with a temporary word "old-y"
find/replace all "X" with "Y"
find/replace all "old-y" with "X"

I assume this would work......... try simulation in your cnc software first.

The text header at the start does have some words changed but they are just comments not code.

Does your cnc software allow you to easily transpose x and y for this sort of situation?

Sorry it's been a while since I posted. I'll try to cover the various questions above here:

This is for switzch: https://github.com/mikemag/MonkeyCAM/issues/24 I'll try to get to it sometime soon, but in the meantime most CNC controllers have an option to transpose X & Y. I agree, though, that transposition in the controller will always be confusing so I'll add support for selecting which axis is which.

I think Rich took care of mikemigs10 over Skype, but if there's still problems gimme a shout and I'll help out. Thanks for going the extra mile Rich!!!

For Montucky's question about this vs. Boardcrafter: the "CAM" in MonkeyCAM is critical. MonkeyCAM is all about taking a parametric description of a board and generating G-Code programs to run the machine directly. It is not a CAD program, and it only produces pretty outlines to help us understand the G-Code programs before we run them.

I'll integrate MonkeyCAM with SnoCAD-X sometime Real Soon Now(TM) then you'll have the best of both worlds: the original ski/snowboard CAD with domain-specific CAM.

The final benefit of this is with MonkeyCAM and now SnoCAD-X being open source we have the opportunity to get other people on-board with their development. It hasn't happened yet, but I remain hopeful

MonkeyCAM is available for PC now. Download the zip from the release page here: https://github.com/mikemag/MonkeyCAM/releases And fear not the command line... your CNC controller is the ultimate command line

Yes we did a really fun and informative skype based demo for Mikemigs10 and I'd be happy to do this again as a 1 on 1 or for a group , I can share my desktop on skype and give you a run down on using MonkeyCAM and how to use it. Anyone interested in this please pm me and I'll send you my skype id to connect with.

cheers
Rich

Head Monkey wrote:Sorry it's been a while since I posted. I'll try to cover the various questions above here:

This is for switzch: https://github.com/mikemag/MonkeyCAM/issues/24 I'll try to get to it sometime soon, but in the meantime most CNC controllers have an option to transpose X & Y. I agree, though, that transposition in the controller will always be confusing so I'll add support for selecting which axis is which.

I think Rich took care of mikemigs10 over Skype, but if there's still problems gimme a shout and I'll help out. Thanks for going the extra mile Rich!!!

For Montucky's question about this vs. Boardcrafter: the "CAM" in MonkeyCAM is critical. MonkeyCAM is all about taking a parametric description of a board and generating G-Code programs to run the machine directly. It is not a CAD program, and it only produces pretty outlines to help us understand the G-Code programs before we run them.

I'll integrate MonkeyCAM with SnoCAD-X sometime Real Soon Now(TM) then you'll have the best of both worlds: the original ski/snowboard CAD with domain-specific CAM.

The final benefit of this is with MonkeyCAM and now SnoCAD-X being open source we have the opportunity to get other people on-board with their development. It hasn't happened yet, but I remain hopeful

MonkeyCAM is available for PC now. Download the zip from the release page here: https://github.com/mikemag/MonkeyCAM/releases And fear not the command line... your CNC controller is the ultimate command line

If do another skype session, maybe record it and put it on youtube so others get an idea of how this all works.

chrismp wrote:If do another skype session, maybe record it and put it on youtube so others get an idea of how this all works.

Great idea I'll do that for sure.

I'm fired up with all this cnc stuff at the moment because my cnc build is finally progressing to the point I have nice rapidly moving motors on bench test , moving to MonkeyCAM produced g-code and Mach3 control, so the more practice I can get the better.

So who's up first for a lesson? I'd rather demo it to someone and do a bit of q&a rather than just me talking to the screen!

mikemigs10 wrote:Thanks Rich am going to give it a mother shot on my flight home over the weekend. Ill let you know how it goes.

Hey Mike how is your MonkeyCAM going for you? Are you making progress cnc'ing cores yet? Give me a call on Skype if you want some more guidance there ok, no problem. cheers, Rich