CAM software options
Posted by ttsalo
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CAM software options May 15, 2012 11:27AM |
Registered: 12 years ago Posts: 313 |
I have been looking for a CAM program, to create the GCode for my MF70 CNC mill. So far I have found:
PyCAM: The PushCutter and DropCutter milling strategies seem to work pretty nicely. Unfortunately the contour cutting is more or less unusable. It's quite buggy in 0.5.1 and in 0.6 (the latest sources) it forms the cutting path from the PushCutter grid, which means that to get a accurate path, you have to set the overlap to a very large percentage and the calculation takes forever. And even after that, the contour (waterline) cutting only slices the model at fixed intervals. There is actually no way to get it to cut the actual contours in the object, the cutting is only done to where the lowest slicing level on that contour happens to be.
HeeksCAD with HeeksCNC: The contour, adaptive roughing and pocket milling operations look more promising than PyCAM's. Unfortunately this is a pain in the butt to setup and on my computer it crashes about every two minutes. The precompiled packages don't include the necessary libraries to actually produce the CNC code.
Does anyone know of any other usable options? Free, or reasonably priced?
PyCAM: The PushCutter and DropCutter milling strategies seem to work pretty nicely. Unfortunately the contour cutting is more or less unusable. It's quite buggy in 0.5.1 and in 0.6 (the latest sources) it forms the cutting path from the PushCutter grid, which means that to get a accurate path, you have to set the overlap to a very large percentage and the calculation takes forever. And even after that, the contour (waterline) cutting only slices the model at fixed intervals. There is actually no way to get it to cut the actual contours in the object, the cutting is only done to where the lowest slicing level on that contour happens to be.
HeeksCAD with HeeksCNC: The contour, adaptive roughing and pocket milling operations look more promising than PyCAM's. Unfortunately this is a pain in the butt to setup and on my computer it crashes about every two minutes. The precompiled packages don't include the necessary libraries to actually produce the CNC code.
Does anyone know of any other usable options? Free, or reasonably priced?
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Re: CAM software options May 15, 2012 04:23PM |
Registered: 13 years ago Posts: 406 |
[cnc4free.org] is worth a look, you may find something, cnctoolkit is good but not easy to use, cambam has a free version and paid version,
freemill is ok for some types of work, you may finish up with a collection of software to do different jobs.
Random Precision
freemill is ok for some types of work, you may finish up with a collection of software to do different jobs.
Random Precision
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Re: CAM software options May 29, 2012 07:16PM |
Registered: 12 years ago Posts: 313 |
I got heekscnc working after installing the 0.18beta packages on Ubuntu 11 and compiling the extra libraries from git. It has some limitations (mainly that it doesn't want to do much with imported plain stls) but overall it's capable of some really nice work. Here's my Proxxon MF70 conversion milling a T2.5 belt pulley: Mf70 milling.
That was done by slicing the pulley model into DXFs in OpenSCAD and then creating Pocket and Profile operations based on those in heekscnc. Pocketing with zigzag mode and then finishing by cutting the profile works well, the results are quite accurate with very few unnecessary moves.
That was done by slicing the pulley model into DXFs in OpenSCAD and then creating Pocket and Profile operations based on those in heekscnc. Pocketing with zigzag mode and then finishing by cutting the profile works well, the results are quite accurate with very few unnecessary moves.
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