Help on writing a nesting macro

What kind of budget do you have to this? I mean for your time?

It will probably be a 'when and able' task, slotting it in when time allows.

Pete,

I would suggest looking for an off-the-shelf solution. There are some low end 2D nesting applications for less than $1K, and developing an algorithim yourself (particularly with little macro writing knowledge) will end up costing many times more than this of your time. It's difficult to do.

You might want to have a look at the following links. I have used none of these, so I cant vouch for their performance. But the prices are very low. If you are unable to bear the cost of these applications, you will certainly be unable to bear the cost of developing something yourself. Good luck, and let us know how the demos look if you try any of them.

- Luther

It also depends on the type of nesting that you are doing. If you are cutting many sheets of expensive material, in the same pattern, a human being will almost always produce a better nest, utilizing less material, than even the most expensive programs. I recently spent nearly a week nesting some parts to be cut from fabric and tape via a laser (only 2 different nests). I also sent the same parts to all of the nesting software places I could find that looked like they may have a shot at doing better ( about 6 firms ). The closest utilized 20% less material than I did. At the cost of the material savings, I could have spent a month nesting the parts, and still come out ahead, although after a week, my sanity was fading quickly.

If your material is not expensive and have to do many different layouts, but can't justify much investment, you might take a look at this software. samtechindia.com. Their demo software is semi-funtional ( limited to 3 shapes I believe, and possibly the # of degrees of rotation that it'll check). Howver, it does export a .dxf, and is free.... free is good.

Pete,

Brian is right, humans tend to do this better. When I do parts that are intended to nest I will generally create and assembly with a sheet of whatever and nest my parts as I go. Sometimes I will make design decisions based on whether the parts will nest. In other words the part is designed to fulfill its purpose and nest simultaneously. No nesting program can do this.

Thanks guys for your input. I am going to take your advice and opt for the manual method. Thinking about it the time put in to writing, and debugging, a macro would never have been recouped.

Thanks again

(Posting from home as I now have a couple of days off.)

Pete