New Feature for Image2Punch Pro version 3.x.x.
Significant developments had been done after releasing the 2nd version of Image2Punch. As a result of this, there are many great features added on the 3rd version of Image2Punch. Brief descriptions of all the new features included in the 3rd version is described as below.
There are 6 themes that can be used to suit the user style, and the theme can be changed “on the fly” by clicking the Theme Menu item on View Menu. Every time a particular theme is selected, Image2Punch will use the current theme until the user change to another theme.
In this 3rd version, users are able to use either mm or inch unit measurement. Every time the user changes the unit measurement, all the dimension and parameter will also be converted into a new unit measurement.
This new feature will allow the user to import or export their current tooling database into a file. This feature will help customer to create a special tooling database for each particular CNC Machine tool if needed.
This feature will allow the user to create, export and import their material database in generating the perforated pattern design. The purposes of his feature is to give user a greater degree of freedom both in estimating the final weight of the perforated sheet by defining a proper material density, and in improving the visualize appearance of the perforated pattern by selecting a colour to represent the actual material’s colour as close as possible. For example, Mild steel will be associated with black as their colour.
This feature allows user to sort their current selective tooling by “drag-and-drop” the tooling according to the desired priority order before the perforated pattern is generated.
This feature has been exclusively added for circular and spiral pattern type. This feature will give the user more freedom in designing perforated pattern for their sheet metal perforation project. In the circular pattern type, user can make all the tools rotate toward the centre of the sheet and this will give a different perfective of the perforated pattern design. In the spiral pattern type, the user is not only able to rotate toward the centre of the sheet but also is able to rotate toward their adjacent tool after and before it. Thus, this will give another design perspective.
This feature allows user to define the angle position of particular tool when he or she create a tool in the tooling database. This feature will give the user more freedom in designing perforated pattern for their sheet metal perforation project.
This feature has been added to support those that using CNC laser cutting as the CNC machine tool to manufacture image-based perforated sheet metal. Instead of selecting the tool one by one for generating the perforated pattern, by using this feature the user can automatically generate a list of tool by specifying the smallest tool, the largest tool and the total number of the tool will be used to generate the pattern based on the selected tool type. The maximum tool type that can be generated is 250 tools.
This feature has been added to specifically support CNC Turret Punch machine tool in manufacturing image-based perforated sheet meal. By replacing many single tool hits into cluster punch, the tool hits can be reduced and this will make the perforation process faster and the bowing because of too many single hits on the material will be reduced as well.
Internal Improvement and Programming Error
Besides all these new features on the third version of Image2Punch, a number of internal programming bugs had also been fixed and the performance in viewing the perforated pattern has also been tweaked to improve the speed. In addition, the statistic report has also been improved to give more information to the user as a result of many new features introduced in this latest version of Image2Punch.