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| John Hill:
I am building my CNC router table and have LinuxCNC installed and driving steppers that are at present mounted on a piece of wood. I also installed FreeCAD on another Linux machine. Both are Ubuntu OS. Now then, there are a few gaps in my understanding!!! FreeCAD draws 3D objects and LinuxCNC can (or will be able to) drive my router table, but surely there is something missing in middle? Also, I presume if I just want to cut out a few shapes I can just write some G-codes in a file and let LinuxCNC get to work? There must be aids to do this so what should I be looking for? There is a big, very steep, learning 'mountain' right in front of me! |
| philf:
--- Quote from: John Hill on February 06, 2015, 03:23:35 AM --- Now then, there are a few gaps in my understanding!!! FreeCAD draws 3D objects and LinuxCNC can (or will be able to) drive my router table, but surely there is something missing in middle? Also, I presume if I just want to cut out a few shapes I can just write some G-codes in a file and let LinuxCNC get to work? There must be aids to do this so what should I be looking for? There is a big, very steep, learning 'mountain' right in front of me! --- End quote --- John, The missing link is a CAM program. If you want true 3d CAM then I don't know of a free version or if there any Linux versions. For Windows there are a few "budget" 3d CAM offerings. Vectric Cut3d, CamBam, MeshCam, DeskProto are typical but expect to pay a few £100s! I don't know a lot about top end 3d packages but the ones I've tried are incredibly slow and seem to take a lot of time cutting thin air. More common is a 2.5d program. The .5 axis is the Z axis and Z moves are separate to the X & Y. Thus you can e.g. machine a pocket to a fixed depth but not put a slope on the floor of that pocket. I use Vectric Cut2d which isn't too expensive. I'd love to know of a cheap 3d package Much can be done by writing the G-Code manually but not for a complex 3d part. I hope someone else will come up with a solution for you. Cheers Phil |
| David Jupp:
PyCAM is open source and available for Linux. No idea how good it is - like much Linux software I get put off by all the hoops it is necessary to jump through. |
| vtsteam:
I use free Sketchup 7 for 3D design and free SketchuCAM add-on to generate the G-code. These are Windows programs but they run in WINE under Linux. SketchUCam is 2.5D not 3D so far (when I last checked) but is under continual development and improvement. It's located at the Phlatboyz site. I believe there are limited but free versions of CamBam, and those are I believe true 3D, but I haven't tried them yet under WINE in linux. I believe they will work, though. |
| RotarySMP:
To get started, you can draw your toolpath as a polyline in Freecad and save it as a DXF file, and then use the share program DXF2gcode to convert them. http://code.google.com/p/dxf2gcode/ You can edit to final code to add your Z axis moves by hand. G-CODE files are simple text files so you can edit them in wordpad or Gredit in Linux. You can also use EXCEL for writting g-code of geometry shapes. Mark |
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