Free program to make gears / sprockets

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10 Aug 2013 10:06 #37537 by TuscolaMatt
Long story short - I'm building an RC tank-like vehicle using a couple wheelchair drive motors. I bought "track" off ebay in the form of conveyors. Anyway, I needed special 1"pitch gears (or sprockets - whatever) to drive the track. Sooooo, being a programmer, I wrote this nifty little program. You input the parameters of your gear, and this program will generate the gcode and place it on your C drive (root directory - sorry!). I have a little 7x7 running LinuxCNC - and the resulting gcode executes just fine. Since I don't have a "real" cnc, I don't know how this will work with other machines. There's no code for turning on cooling pumps and extra stuff little machines don't use - FYI. I went a little above and beyond what I needed and cleaned up the program so most can figure it out and use it too!

I've run this on Vista and on Win7. Should run on XP and 8 as well...

For a test example, run the program and enter these values:

Diameter - 150mm
teeth - 20
width ratio - 3
feed rate - 1000
tooth height - 13mm
depth - 9mm
add mounting holes - Y
number of holes - 5
distance from center - 50mm

This happens to be the parameters I needed for my drive sprockets (FYI)

Here's the download link:
tuscolatexas.us/download/GearGCoderV1.0.exe

The root site is mine - I use it to put whatever on it.
I'll try to post a picture of a finished gear.
No, this is not virus-ware or spy-ware of any kind. It will only write the resulting GCode. Feel free to scan it / monitor it.

I hope someone else finds this useful! I had a lot of fun writing it...

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12 Aug 2013 16:09 #37584 by jpka
Hi!
As you may notice, none on this website is related to Windows, and none is distributed without source code. So if you wish to make anything useful by community, you should do is like so (let's Big Machinists correct me):
1. Write stuff that runs from Linux/Gnome, and always add No GUI mode if GUI is not mandatory (as for your case);
2. Publish your stuff in source code form (preferably C, Python);
3. Add testcase / result files for testing by other users.
And then if it looks useful, it can be included in mainstream software.

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