Vectric® Tip | Calculations in Numerical Boxes

You may read that title and ask what in the world does that mean? Well basically it means that you can do simple and some complex math equations in Vectric® software. Watch the video below for more info and also download the free printable PDF below:

Video Transcript:

now we're going to take a look at how to do calculations inside of the edit text boxes here almost every box that you can enter a number in you can also do a calculation in so we're going to go to this chart i made here i made this chart you can download below and you can print this out if you like and then here i show you examples of different calculations you can do you can do addition subtraction multiplication division and you can use any of these variables down here below and do uh either simple or complex calculations inside the text box so for example if you use the w or the x key that would be your material with if you do the h or the y key that'll be your material height and you can see if you do h times four so if your height was five inches and you did h times four then that would be five times four and that would equal twenty and we do have the same thing for the thickness this would be the material thickness you can use the letter t or the letter z for the pi symbol here you can use the letter p if you want to convert metric into imperial use the letter i and then the same thing if you want to convert imperial to metric use the letter m and if you want to do feet use the apostrophe now i'll show you some examples inside the vectric software let's go back to there now when you're setting up your job here you can enter in whatever width height and thickness your material is so in this case we're going to do 20 inches by 20 inches by three quarters of an inch thick and then we're going to come down here to ok now our job's set up for that size now let's say for example we want to do a rectangle now let's say if we wanted to put the rectangle in the exact center of our material there's several ways you can do that but i'm going to show you how to do it with the calculations so to start you want to center your anchor point to the center of your bounding box here now if we take our x anchor point and we take this and erase what's in there now now let's type in the letter x that'll be the variable for the width of our material which is the 20 inches that we entered earlier now if you use the divide symbol now type in the number two so what that's going to do is x divided by 2 so that's going to be 20 divided by 2 because that's what we entered in our job setup is 20 inches wide now to complete this calculation click the equal sign on your keyboard and now you can see that it turns upwith number 10. if you do the same thing for the y you can enter y divided by two or you can also if we erase this you could do h h is also represented by the height of our material so if we do h divided by 2 type in equals and we also get 10 there as well because this is 20 inches now if we come down here to our width of our rectangle we're going to be drawing here you can select this and we'll erase that and let's say if we wanted the rectangle to be one-third the width of our material so we can type in x here for our material with and then we'll do divide and then by a number three and now type in equals now that's going to be one third of our material width now if we come down here to the rectangle height let's erase this now let's say if we wanted the height to be one quarter of our material height so we could do the letter y for material height and then divide by four and then type in equals and that will give us our value there and now we click create and now we have a perfectly centered rectangle the width of our rectangle is one-third the width of our material and the height of the rectangle is one-fourth of our material height and then we can come down here and click close and those calculations aren't only for drawing shapes if we also come down here we can go to the scale tool if we select that rectangle we just created and now we can come over here let's unlink the x and y let's say if we wanted to take the height and multiply it by two so if we just do the multiplication symbol and then number two and click equals and now you can see five times two equals ten just click apply and now that created a rectangle ten inches high and then we can also do addition and subtraction let's say we want to take the width let's add two inches so plus two click the equal sign now that just added two inches click apply and now it's two inches wider and then the same thing for subtraction say if we take the height subtract using the minus symbol number one for one inch click equals now ten minus one equals nine click apply and now our height is one inch shorter now let's close this out and let's delete this rectangle and if we go back to our chart we can see we use the w and the x for the material width we use the h and the y for material height the next one we have here is material thickness you can use that by using the letter t or the letter z now these variables are more commonly used when you're creating toolpaths so i'll show you how to do that let's go back to vcarve here let's go over to our toolpath tab and let's say if you're creating a pocket we'll go to the pocket toolpath and for the cut depth we can select this and if you want to go all the way through your material just type in the letter z for material thickness and then just type the equal sign and now you can see that it'll insert the material thickness that we specified in our job setup and that's good if you forget what your material thickness was you can just type that in very quickly and that way you don't set your tool path too deep and then another thing we could do let's erase this you can also type in the letter t for material thickness it's the same thing as the letter z and let's say if we wanted to cut a pocket halfway through our material so if we do the letter t the divide symbol number two for doing in half and then type in the equal sign and now you can see we get point three seven five so that would be three eighths of an inch which is half of our three quarter inch material so these are just some easy ways to do some calculations in your cut depth box here so now if we go back down let's click close let's go back to our 2d drawing tab and let's go back to our chart and you can see the the next one we have here is the letter p that'll give you the pi value now this one isn't used too often but it's there if you need it for example here we have the area of a radius circle so the formula for that is pi times radius squared so this is how you would enter here let's go back to our vectric software so let's go to the circle tool here let's switch it to radius let's do a five inch radius and we're just going to click in the center here now we have a five inch radius circle to be 10 inches in diameter and now if you wanted to figure out the area inside of the circle we can use our calculation box here let's type in the letter p for the pi and use the multiplication symbol so times and now we're going to do the radius of that circle we just entered which is a five inch radius and now we have to square that number and to do that hold down your shift key and hit the number six that'll give you this symbol here to square and now type in the number two so now we have the formula pi times the radius which is five and then we're going to square that and then now type in the equal sign and now you get this number here and that'll be the area inside the circle in inches and like i said there's not too many times you use that formula but if you need it it's there and there is an easier way to get the radius of your circle we can check this number here78.5 let's close this let's go to our measure tool here and if we go to span and then select our circle and we come down here you can see the vector area78.5 and that's the number we got when we did the formula as well so like i said it's easier to find out the area inside this tool here but if you needed the pi calculation for anything you can use the letter p when you're doing your calculations now let's delete this circle and go back to our chart the next two we have here is imperial conversion and metric conversion so these are if you want to convert inches to metric or metric to inches so let's go back to our metric software now we can go back to our circle tool and this time we're going to switch to a diameter and let's erase this number here and now let's say we're creating a design that requires a 10 millimeter hole now since our job setup wasn't done in inches all of our default values are going to be in inches so we're going to have to convert 10 millimeters to inches so to do that type in the number 10 in our box here and if we click create that's going to create a 10 inch circle so we want that converted from metric to inches so to do that do the time symbol and do the letter i and that's going to take 10 inches and convert it from metric to imperial now type in the equal sign and you can see we get0.3 37 that's the imperial equivalent to 10 millimeters let's click create and now we have a 10 millimeter circle there but it was converted to inches and then you could do the same thing to convert back to millimeters by taking a number and use the time symbol and then this time you type in the letter m to convert to metric type in the equal sign you can see we get 9.9 998 that's because when it converted to inches it rounded to the fourth decimal place so when you convert it back to metric it's going to get close but not exact but you can always take this and erase that and just type in number 10. but those are just quick ways to convert metric to inches very quickly or vice versa now let's close this out let's go back to our chart one more time and our last variable here is the apostrophe which stands for feet so you can see we can do we can convert feet to inches so let's go back to our vectric software let's go to the rectangle tool again and let's say we're creating a design let's select our width here we'll erase this and let's say we were creating a design that was one feet four inches so you can convert that in your head real quick or a simple way to do it is just type in the number one here for feet type in the apostrophe and now that stands for one foot and now let's do the addition symbol and then we want to do four inches so type in the number four so now the equation we have here is one foot plus four inches now type in the equal sign and that equals 16 inches and we can keep our height the same and now click create and now we have a rectangle that is 16 inches wide or also it would be one feet and four inches that's a quick way if you have a design that's laid out in feet you can quickly convert it to inches and then in addition to doing these simple equations here you can also do more complex equations i'll show you how to do that real quick here let's go to our rectangle tool let's take our width and let's erase that and now we could we could do a more complex equation here let's do x divided by two so if we type the equal sign that'll divide our width by two but before we finish this we can add more to this let's do plus six so what that's going to do is take our material with divide it by two and then after it does that it's going to add six more inches let's type in equals we get 16 inches because we took 20 divided by 2 which would have would have been 10 inches and then we added six more additional inches we got 16 inches and if you click create that's going to create that rectangle there so you can see you could do many different equations inside of all your number boxes here so that gives you many possibilities and allows you to quickly add subtract multiply divide or convert within the boxes here and that way you could do it right here in the vectric software and don't have to keep using a calculator

This tutorial and many more can be found in my Vectric® Master Training Course.