Design of extendable Tool Path Generation software for 3D printing

Tool Path Generation is one of the important steps in 3D printing (3DP) processes. An extendable tool path generation software is designed aimed at supporting all 3DP processes in this paper. At first, an extendable architecture is created based on the principle of tool path generating which all 3DP processes should follow. Then, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) is designed with a Visual Studio like style and OpenGL is used to display slicing layers and tool paths in both 2D and 3D. At last, the parallel computing is introduced to save the generation time. Experiment result shows that, the presented software works faster than the commercial software CTools.