Camotics ... anybody playing with it?

CAD (Design) Software CAD (General)
1

So yeah I am one of the FreeCad users, in it’s beta release they talked of Camotics integration. I had to check it it.

On the Camotics web page they say “Buildbotics … Connect Camotics to your CNC” … Hmm sounds interesting especially when under future plans I see: CNC remote control

Could this be the single step operation some folks have been looking for?

2

I started playing with it last night. The UI is working OK I guess but the documentation is sparse at best.

What I would like to experiment with is the command line tool tplang.exe that came with the CAMotics download. (Documented here: https://tplang.org/#usage). I’m new to CNC but have plenty of software engineering experience and I should be able to figure this out.

Right off the bat trying to generate gcode with the example failed. There is no tool table loaded so the the statement: tool(1) fails. If I comment that out I can get the gcode to generate.

I see how to export the tool table to JSON in the CAMotics UI, but I can’t seem to find how to load that into the tplang.exe process.

I tried to:

var tools = require('./tools.json');
tool(1);

…and even

tool(tools[0]);

…that didn’t throw an error but:

console.log(tool());

…didn’t show a tool selected.

The API doc for tool() doesn’t mention how to load the tool table.

I’m losing faith. The documentation is severely lacking. If I could figure out how to get up and running and start learning these tools I would be happy to contribute to the documentation effort. Being that CNC and CNC programming is a new problem domain for me, I’m not smart enough to help much at this point.

I hope you’ve had better luck.

3

So I am back. Taking a CNC class at a local community college… learning G code. I see you were trying to use TPL (Javascript like) … I can relate I am a C/C++ guy for 40 years.

What Camotics says it supports is the G98/G99 pair. These are sub programs. Crossing my fingers that it works.