Hi all,

Well, didn't see the last two replies but thank you also for suggesting ;-)

As it is I have bought EstlCam and it looks reasonably straightforward for simple 3D structures (which is what I mainly need to mill), however, I have used most of the day today on trying to convert a very simple drawing in Moi3D (FYI attached) to something that I can import as a 2D file into Estlcam so as to make milling easier - 2D. The file quite simply are for holes in the CNC's spoilboard so that I can actually mill something ... And either Estlcam comes up with an error message like "empty file" or corrupted file ... or, if I try to convert an .ai file exported from MOI to DXF or SVG either it doesn't work or the drawing becomes HUGE (like many, many meters on each side), or there are no holes in it when it is imported in EstlCam (??). So I am actually - and unusually with MOI - pretty frustrated now as I don't seem to find a simple way to export 2D files into a format that Estlcam can handle.

So by posting here I hope one of you know how this can be done - it would be appreciated ;-)

Cheers & thanks,

Jesper

A P.S. ... feel like adding that it likely is not an MOI "challenge" .. but sometimes it would be feasible to have an extended MOI conversion range like e.g. DXF or SVG. ... Thinking aloud here and - as always - with the cautious reservation that I may have overlooked something ...

... Cheers ...

Jesper

Hi Jesper,

I opened your moi file and what I can say now is that you better use real 2D, that means only use edges and not faces.

make sure that the unit system is set to mm or cm in the MoI options dialog, otherwise the G code generator will not be able to determine the size.



I selected the top face of your spoil board, copied it, then deleted the whole and pasted just the top face. then I selected just the edges from the face, copied it, deleted the whole and pasted just the edges. then I joined the whole, to make sure to have continuous lines.

this gives a 2D drawing which can be exported like this:



this yields a 2D dxf file which I trust to open without problems in Estlcam, I made an identical file for my machine last year.

Hi Wimverbe,

First - thank you very much for your prompt reply! ... I appreciate this ;-)

And then - seeing the screendumps in your post I looked a bit more into this this morning and found out that the reason why I can't export DXF from within MoI is because I am using V2. Apparently DXF export was added to MoI in V3. And for some reason the other solutions I tried for converting the file to DXF (online internet conversion & other CAD programs) didn't work at least from a quick glance ...

This is to say that since I have for a long time now been considering upgrading to V3 I decided that this was the time to do so. Thus I have now bought an upgrade and with inspiration from your guidance it took less than five minutes to make the DXF export and correctly import it into Estlcam. Quite a relief ..

So Wimverbe - thanks again for your help & wishing you a pleasant day ;-)

Jesper

glad it works for you Yesper!
happy milling!

wim

Upgrading good! You are good to go....

For anybody else, michael wrote a helper program for those older versions... it's towards the bottom of the resources page.

3dm curves to dxf....