How to determine the surface area of the slices

[Anna_P 0]

Hey, I want to use Cura as slicing software to output the surface area of the slices of my parts. I thought that the "Analysis Mesh" could help me, but it only gives the area of the surface of the part. 

 

The idea is to transfer the value of the surface area of each slice (or maybe only every 100th slice to save data) to Excel to work with it there. 

 

Does anyone know how I could do this? 

 

Thanks in advance!!!

[curatori 7]

Are you sure you mean surface area?
Surface area is a two-dimensional quantity (length x width)
What exactly do you want to achieve?

[GregValiant 1,251]

There are a couple of difficulties beyond  the fact that Cura can't do an export like that.  The gcode moves are all lines with no relation between them.  A circle is comprised of a lot of very short lines and has no center point.  You can read the gcode into Excel with a streamreader, or open the gcode in Excel as a delimited text file, but either way the data still needs to be parsed to pull the X Y Z numbers out.

 

I have a couple of macros for analyzing gcode data but the main analysis tool I have is a macro for reading a gcode into AutoCad.  Each layer is then a collection of lines that describe the geometry of the layer.  All outside dimensions are 1/2 line width off from the actual model outer wall.  That isn't a problem with something regular like a cube.  If you were to slice 25mm cube with a .4 line width then the periphery of the lines would measure 24.6 x 24.6. (That's one of the reasons when re-creating a model from a gcode file is so time intensive.)

Within a Cura gcode file there are "comments" that describe what the upcoming commands are for.  If you were to limit yourself to "TYPE:OUTER-WALL" and within the Outer-Wall further limit yourself to G1 commands then that would be a start but an inside cavity would also have outer walls and would need to be subtracted from the area of the slice.

 

Anyway, I don't see this happening with just Excel.

 

Here is a gcode read into AutoCad (which by the way will start out reading and re-creating the file at around 1200lines of code/second but as the screen populates with more and more items then the data rate will fall to around 300 lines/second.  It sounds like a lot until you realize the file is 1.7million lines long.

 

Here is layer 161 of that file on the left, and on the right I copied over the Outer-Walls and the orange lines at an offset of .2mm to emulate the actual periphery of the model.  Querying AutoCad for the area of the orange polygon returns the 147.142 I stuck in on the right.

 

[curatori 7]

I think the easiest way to reduce data would be to zip the G-Code.