F360 and GIT. Something I find Useful

CAD (Design) Software Fusion 360
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I thought I would share a process I use in case others are interested.

I use F360 for my Design and CAM.
When you make minor changes to a design in F360, it often notifies you that you need to re-generate all tool paths even though, in many cases, some will not be changed, but you never know.

To see whether the re-generated gcode changed due to the design change, I use GIT. GIT is a piece of free-to-use version control software. It can, amongst many other features, highlight changes to text files, like g-code files.

My recent use-case: I started milling a design in Aluminium when I realised I had forgotten to un-suppress a design feature I had suppressed during prototyping. However, whilst I felt that I could stop, un-supress, re-process and start milling, I did not know for sure whether it had changed the position of the part in the stock. Using GIT I found that, in my case, subsequent tool paths had not changed meaning that the position of the part in the stock had not changed - phew!

I also use the compare feature to see whether changes have had unintended knock effects on tool paths that are not obvious when using F360.

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Hey Andy,

I also use Git and can only praise its enormous usefulness, not only for writing and managing code, but also for texts or writing of any purpose. The same applies to the diffs, with which the differences between texts are displayed in color so differences can be seen at first glance. Git was created by Linus Torvalds for managing the Linux kernel source code, but it is used for thousands of other projects today. I described git → in this post the other day.

There are also diffs outside of Git, e.g. the forum software we use here uses Markdown language which supports Unified Diff syntax highlighting:

Here I have a text.
- I have not changed it.
+ I have changed it after all.
That looks pretty good.
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