Cutlist generator

Computers & Mobile Furniture & Lighting
Cutlist generator

0cutlist.jpg

Here’s an older computer program I hadn’t seen until today: Cutlist Generator figures out how to make most efficient use of your wood based on the measurements of your pieces. Windows only, but it’s free! I can’t imagine it would be that hard to port to a web app… Via Core77.

4 thoughts on “Cutlist generator

  1. SteveC says:

    If I’m not mistaken (and I might be) this is equivalent to, the box packing problem, and it is NP-complete. So, easy? No.

    My suspicion is also that it only works with rectangular pieces, and so cannot do clever nesting of odd shaped pieces.

  2. Matti Airas says:

    Last spring, while designing the MDF cutting layout for my DIY CNC router project, I got frustrated and spent a week’s worth of evenings researching and implementing a suitable strip packing algorithm. Here are the results:

    http://mairas.net/wiki/Freecut

    The cutting and packing field is one with plenty of previous research. This is an excellent meta-paper regarding the topic:

    Gerhard Wäscher, Heike Haußner, and Holger Schumann. An improved typology of cutting and packing problems. European Journal of Operational Research 183:1109–1130, 2007.

    If you’re interested but can’t get hold of the paper, email me and we’ll figure out something.

    Cheers,

    ma.

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Becky Stern is a Content Creator at Autodesk/Instructables, and part time faculty at New York’s School of Visual Arts Products of Design grad program. Making and sharing are her two biggest passions, and she's created hundreds of free online DIY tutorials and videos, mostly about technology and its intersection with crafts. Find her @bekathwia on YouTube/Twitter/Instagram.

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