Jpg to Surf Cam/G-Code

[Vince Cimo]

so i'm trying to do something kind of odd and i need your help. I'm rebuilding the walls on my bedroom and as it's in an artsy loft which gets extremely hot i figured i'd make a self ventilating art wall. to do this, i planned on taking a photo, editing it in photoshop to get a b&w image composed out of dots (drill holes), then tracing those dots in a vector program, sizing the vector output so the holes are slightly bigger then the drill bit, and then turning that into g-code using surf cam. my problem is that i have no idea how to do the last part. if i have a vector image correctly sized in b&w with just circles, how can i get this to a cnc mill that only uses surfcam? I've seen a few jpg to g-code programs out there, but to my understanding i can't directly send g-code to the mill w/o going through surfcam. (i may be wrong about that...which is why i'm posting). please help make my room awesome!

[Doug Griffith]

so i'm trying to do something kind of odd and i need your help. I'm rebuilding the walls on my bedroom and as it's in an artsy loft which gets extremely hot i figured i'd make a self ventilating art wall. to do this, i planned on taking a photo, editing it in photoshop to get a b&w image composed out of dots (drill holes), then tracing those dots in a vector program, sizing the vector output so the holes are slightly bigger then the drill bit, and then turning that into g-code using surf cam. my problem is that i have no idea how to do the last part. if i have a vector image correctly sized in b&w with just circles, how can i get this to a cnc mill that only uses surfcam? I've seen a few jpg to g-code programs out there, but to my understanding i can't directly send g-code to the mill w/o going through surfcam. (i may be wrong about that...which is why i'm posting). please help make my room awesome!

Hi Vince,
I have some experience getting vector images into SurfCam and it hasn't been that easy. I would open the bitmap image in Illustrator, manually trace the image, and then export in a format that SurfCam understands, DXF should be fine. Once imported into SurfCam, I would then replace each imported circle (which is actually a many sided polygon) with true circles. This will give the best final result. From there, post-process away.

Cheers

[Tom Majewski]

I don't know anything about surfcam.

All I know is a friend of mine uses a program called BMP2CNC to get images to his cnc router.

Might be worthless info, but that's all I can bring to the table today.