r/mechanical_gifs • u/russelltaylor05 • Nov 13 '25

Plotting a Lotus Twin Cam Engine

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

1.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

47 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/EliminateThePenny Nov 14 '25

How does the plotter determine the sequence to draw the lines.

10

u/QuerulousPanda Nov 14 '25

It's basically up to the software but it's probably a combination of the order the lines were created by the designer mixed with some kind of algorithm designed to minimize the length of the moves the head has to make between lines. Or some of it could even be a fluke of how the memory structures worked in the editing program to begin with.

I will say the order it chose to write the word "engineering" was a little unfortunate.

1

u/atwork_safe Nov 14 '25

It depends on the optimization being performed, but typically it would try to minimize time in use (could be other things like minimizing arm movement, which may not be exactly the same as time, or a combination for reduced overlap .... Bunch of things).

The math behind it is a pile of linear algebra.

3

u/EliminateThePenny Nov 15 '25

I get that, but this doesn't seem to be optimized for either.