hackaday.com: For hobbyists, there are two types of machines that can make parts at home. The first type is matter-adding machines (3D printers) and the other is matter-subtracting machines (like CNC milling machines). [Mario] recently tipped us about an article he made detailing which free software can be used to design and produce parts on CNC machines.
2 comments:
I haven't done any serious CNC machining of any type, but I'd recommend OpenSCAD (http://www.openscad.org/) for anyone with basic programming experience, or anyone who's familiar with thinking about an object piece by piece, turn by turn, down to the nitty-gritty details. PyCAM seems to be the more popular CAM software though I've never used it. LinuxCNC is not the best but I've heard great things about it. Helpful, I know, but it looks like it's the leading open source software for interpreting Gcode and the userbase and reliable community would be good enough for me.
I've been using CNC machines for a couple of years now, but because I have only ever used that my schools I never had to set up the systems or deal with what types of CAM software to use. I have always wondered with there are other options for this sort of software out there. I really love the open source community and I'm always pleased to hear about new projects out there that will be useful in the future. In the past I have mostly used Soildworks to make 3D models, but it's very expensive so I have to use the school copy. I'm going to be looking in to Heeks and Freecad to see if they could be useful to me. I think that one of the reasons that CAD can be hard to get in to is that the user interface is rather complex. The more people are building this type of software the more the UI will improve and the easier it will be to learn how to do CAD projects.
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