CAM for CNC plasma tables
AlgoNest takes a pile of DXF files and gives you a nested plate and clean G-code. The geometry is solved properly — no-fit polygons, kerf offset in software, cut order that knows where the torch has already been. The name is not decoration: the algorithms are the product.
What AlgoNest is
Load your parts. Tell it what plate you have. Press nest. Drag anything you do not like, because the automatic answer is a starting point, not a verdict. Then look at the toolpath, watch the simulation, and send G-code your controller already speaks.
It is a desktop application for Windows, built for shops running a single-torch plasma table on ordinary structural plate — 2 to 30 mm, the everyday stuff. Not a cloud service, not a subscription to a web app that goes down on the morning of a deadline. Your files stay on your machine.
The key selling point
Most cheap nesting takes the bounding box of each part and plays Tetris. That is fine until you cut a gusset, whose bounding box is mostly air. AlgoNest nests the actual shape, and it does it with the geometry the literature has been using for forty years — implemented properly, which is the hard part.
For two parts, the NFP is the set of every position where they touch but never overlap. Compute it once and “does this fit here?” stops being a question and becomes a lookup. Drag the cyan part on the right and watch it happen.
The NFP of two convex shapes is the Minkowski sum of one with the reflection of the other — A ⊕ (−B). For convex pieces that is an edge merge in linear time: sort both edge lists by angle, chain them, done.
Every part is split into convex pieces by constrained Delaunay triangulation and the triangles merged back into the fewest convex chunks. Sum the pieces pairwise, union the results, and you have an exact NFP for a shape with holes, notches and everything else a fabricator draws at four in the afternoon.
The best placement always touches something. So we only ever test the vertices of the free region — the plate minus every NFP already on it. Hundreds of candidates instead of a blind grid of millions.
Each candidate is scored by how much the occupied envelope expands — by height, by width or towards a corner, whichever you pick. Gravity, essentially, but you choose which way is down.
A part with 180° symmetry gets half its angles thrown away before anything is computed. Every NFP is cached and reused across passes, which is why one warm process beats three cold workers — a lesson learned by measuring, not by guessing.
You decide how long it may think: angle step, number of passes, time budget. The preview updates live, and Stop keeps the best nest found so far. No modal dialogue holding your afternoon hostage.
This is the real thing, computed in your browser by the same edge-merge routine the program uses for convex pieces — about sixty lines of it. Inside the dashed outline the parts overlap. On it, they touch. That boundary is where every candidate position comes from.
Cut strategy — where the money is
Piercing is the most violent thing a plasma torch does: full current into cold plate, with molten metal coming straight back up at the nozzle. Consumables do not die of cutting. They die of piercing. So the interesting question is not “how fast can it cut” but “how many times does it have to start”.
Link two contours and AlgoNest merges them into a single continuous path: out along the link, round the neighbour, back again. The arc never goes out, so the second part costs you no pierce at all. Chain a row of them and a plate that needed forty starts needs four.
Our own trick, and the one people notice first. Instead of piercing into cold plate, the lead-in begins in a slot that is already open — the kerf of a part cut a moment ago, or the edge of the sheet. The torch fires into thin air and walks into the metal sideways. No blow-back, no crater, no nozzle sacrificed on the altar of a 20 mm plate. AlgoNest finds the nearest already-cut kerf for you, part by part, in cut order.
A sharp outside corner is where the torch has to stop dead, turn, and accelerate again — and on thick plate that pause is exactly where the corner burns itself round. A loop sends the torch straight past the corner, round through the scrap, and back onto the next edge already at speed. Nothing is cut that was not going to be scrap anyway. The corner comes out square, the arc never falters, and the gantry stops slamming.
You type the width of the slot the arc burns. AlgoNest offsets the torch path by half of it — outward on outer contours, inward in holes — and shows you both numbers side by side so there is never a doubt about which one you just typed. It is done in software, always. Your controller is never asked for G41/G42, because half of them lie about it.
Below roughly one and a half times the plate thickness, a plasma-cut hole is a tapered disappointment. In the import window you click a hole and choose: leave it out entirely and drill it later, or punch its centre with one short shot so the drill bit has a dimple to find. Either way, the machine stops pretending.
Holes before contours, always. After that: nearest, rows, columns, snake — or you click the parts one by one and AlgoNest remembers. Rapid moves are planned to stay off parts that are already loose, because a tipped-up offcut is how a torch dies young.
Do the arithmetic yourself
We are not going to invent your numbers, so put your own in. These are the four you know off the top of your head, and the one you can look up on the consumables invoice.
Links and edge starts only help where parts sit close together. On a plate of one-offs, drag this down. On a plate of forty identical brackets, drag it up.
SAVED PER YEAR, ON CONSUMABLES ALONE
Straight multiplication, no fudge factor — every assumption above is yours to change. It ignores the interesting part: a nozzle that is not being shelled by blow-back also cuts squarer for longer.
The whole list
Marked honestly: in the beta works today in the development build, on the way is written down, scheduled and not yet finished. We would rather you found this list boring than optimistic.
From the development build
Genuine screenshots of the current build, not a mock-up made in a design tool. Things will move before the beta — that is rather the point of having one.
Where this is going
AlgoNest is being written now, in the open, by people who cut steel with it. The dates below are what we are actually working to. If one of them slips you will read about it here rather than discovering it yourself.
Geometry core, nesting, toolpaths, simulation, G-code and 82 post presets, all under an automated test suite. Cutting real parts on a real table.
A free, downloadable demo for anyone who wants to try it on their own DXF files and their own table. Bring bug reports — there is a button for them, and it goes straight into the development queue.
The remaining toolpath tricks, plus rapid routing around loose parts and the operator sheet.
Short, specific, generated from the program itself so they cannot drift out of date. Written after the interface stops moving, not before.
The demo is free and downloadable, the licence is cheap and the sales process is a form and an email — no calls, no demos-with-a-salesperson, no “let's get you on a quick discovery workshop”.
