Let's talk about CAM

newbynobi wrote: I can only answer with a shake of the head if you want to produce such parts with a 3 axis mill.

Do you do that for hobby, or do you want to earn money?

Norbert

Why do you say that?
I have worked at a thermoplastics composites company and we made far more complex parts on 3 axis machines with no trouble at all. I see no reason why that part would be the least bit difficult on a 3 axis.

Meshcam is a very good product at what I consider to be a pretty low cost. We use it daily and haven't found anything yet it will not do. The CAM side of things is only half of the equation however. How are you doing your CAD part of the work. Are you looking for a CAD/CAM package or just CAM? HeeksCAD and HeeksCNC are well worth looking into if you really want to stay with a Linux solution. We have not had problems with installations on Ubuntu.

yoshimitsuspeed wrote: Do MechCAM or CamBam have any more capability in that area?
Do they have any more potential than pycam as far as tooling paths or finish?
Do any of them allow multiple operations? Like if I wanted to face the above part, then drill or pocket the holes, then switch tools and just mill the contoured pocket? .

It is "MeshCAM".

Both MeshCAM and CamBam have limited runtime demo versions, to you can easily download them and try them.
Both support multiple operations.

www.grzsoftware.com/download/
www.cambam.info/downloads/ or www.cambam.info/ref/ref.linux

gww250 wrote: Meshcam is a very good product at what I consider to be a pretty low cost. We use it daily and haven't found anything yet it will not do. The CAM side of things is only half of the equation however. How are you doing your CAD part of the work. Are you looking for a CAD/CAM package or just CAM? HeeksCAD and HeeksCNC are well worth looking into if you really want to stay with a Linux solution. We have not had problems with installations on Ubuntu.

I have been using freecad for the last couple years hoping it's capability would grow with my needs but unfortunately I need a much more powerful Application. I will likely be buying a seat for Solid edge in the near future.
I was hoping to stay on Linux but NX is about the only other option I have found that runs on Linux and has the capability I need.
Solid Edge is technically well outside what I should be spending on a CAD program so it's hard to justify the extra few grand for NX just to maintain my preferred OS when otherwise Solid Edge should do everything I need it to.

Unfortunately it looks like Siemens CAM programs are equally as expensive.

As to 'finish' and accuracy of cutting any CAM package, even the free ones can handle this well if the user knows how to use the software. We do very precision milling with Meshcam running on both windows and Ubuntu. The overall 'quality of the part has more to do with the machine than the software. Even crude CNC software can handle .001 accuracy pretty easily.
We have about $35000 invested in CAD/CAM software at our shop but actually use only the smallest and least expensive packages for production work. The high-end packages have a lot of 'options' but nobody ever uses them. It has been our experience that the so-called 'soilds modeling packages' are the least beneficial to a machine shop. They are great in the design environment but once the part is created it still needs to eventually be converted to gcode and the high end packages seem to come up short in this area.

I re-read your posts and on one hand it appears as if you're very familiar with the process of design to code but at other times it appears as if you have never actually used any of the packages you mention and you haven't yet told us about the capabilities of you milling machine. A better understanding of what you have will help a lot in understanding exactly what you want as you go forward with your endeavors. What kind of machine do you have first of all and secondly do you need full 3D or just 2.5D code for your projects.