I Cut Profile Cutting.

[terryvegas]

In the sign portion of CNC Routing profile cutting of images printed on rigid substrates has grown from a convenience to a necessity. The first and some say the best system is called I Cut. I know some of you have heard of it. I am posting today, because it has been several years since I first checked to see if anyone was developing the Icut type of profile cutting for  MACH software. Does anyone know of any such development?

[RICH]

Never heard of it myself until now. Seems like it traces the outline based on color difference and then provides a path to cut around it.
So you could do the same using CopyCat by manualy tracking  around the image and then use the generated code to cut  around it.
Surley the tracing is not as fast......but......i bet money it is way cheaper than the price of an I Cut  setup.

Hmmm....been using the Poor Man's  I Cut system for free....
RICH

[terryvegas]

Rich,

The poor man's version can be simple. It is easy for the designer to produce a vector file the matches the image. He then sends the image to the printer and the vector file to the cutter or CNC router. The trick is aligning the 2. In the Summa vinyl cutters they use targets that are printed with the image. These targets can be printed at a position precisely located from zero so that a camera and software can deduce the location of the vector cut path around the image, from the location of the targets . I am not a programer and I don't know how to make camera identify a target, but it seems simple.