My CAD / CAM research

FreeCAD is really good, but, and this is a big but (insert sir mix a lot music here), editing and modifying something you already designed is a no go, better start over.
It has an inherited issue with part naming that makes a mess when deleting a part that has other parts attached to it.
Otherwise it is great, took less than a week of 1-3 hour days to go from nothing to a complete machine designed and parts moving properly on the preview!
And do raise the number of undo moves, it is very low by default, till last night i never needed more, but i did last night so i was out of luck!
Also has CAM, never used it so no idea how good it is.
Do download the latest appimage though, the repos are always behind.
Joko Engineering has some great tutorials on youtube.

thanks tommylight I will check out the cam end of it soon.

my1987toyota wrote:

The thing that pisses me off right now with fusion is I have to do a work around to export DXF
files correctly . And to have to pay for known faulty software every year is enraging to say the least.

There is a simple way to generate dxfs in Fusion without all the nonsense. I'm assuming a sheetmetal workflow.
1. Create a flat pattern and flatten your part
2. Select the flat pattern and create a new sketch. don't add anything to it.
3. In the tree, select the sketch, right click and there is an option to export to a DXF. save it locally.

 

Just thought I'd toss in my $0.02. First let me say that my CNC has been down for quit some time now, so none of the gcode I've generated has been tested. 

EstlCAM does work great in Linux with wine. Just make sure (off the top of my head) dotnet40, d3dx9_36<-- I think and gdiplus are installed in your prefix. There's a great walkthrough that I used somewhere in the web that I can't locate right now.

Deskproto also works great in Linux and the hobby license has 5 axis. IMHO the hobby license for Deskproto is very reasonable. The video tutorials are well worth watching. 

All of Scorch Works apps are really good. ScorchView loaded a 404500 line gcode file generated by Deskproto in 7sec. I thought that was impressive for my lack luster PC. F-Engrave is very impressive also IMO.

Freecad path workbench has some nice dressups such as the dogbone<--Seemed to work well in simulation. The speeds/feeds calculator results seemed proper to what I remember using back when my machine was running. By the way does anyone know of tutorials for the probe and fixture commands?

Yeah I do the save DXF from sketch as the work around . The Export from the top menu is what always screws thing up.

2.5D CAM for Lin,Mac,Win

github.com/multigcs/viaconstructor

OpenSource, Python, LinuxCNC