My current project is a bit of a Jewelry Box with all the sides cut from one prefinished board. The bottom will be a stock plywood bottom, but the top will be a custom carve.
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Aiph5u
(Aiph5u (not affiliated with Onefinity))
25
Hey Carl and Lynn,
wow, what a building. The universities here where I live are rather big in the other dimension (the horizontal)
Below is a friendlier explanation of what the LGPL license means for you:
All users
Anybody can download, use and redistribute FreeCAD free of charge, without any restriction. Your copy of FreeCAD is truly yours, as are the files you produce with FreeCAD. You will not be forced to update FreeCAD after a certain time, nor change your usage of FreeCAD. Using FreeCAD doesn’t bind you to any kind of contract or obligation. The FreeCAD source code is public and can be inspected, so it is possible to verify that it doesn’t do things without your knowledge such as sending your private data somewhere.
Professional users
FreeCAD can be used freely for any kind of purpose, being private, commercial or institutional. Any version of FreeCAD can be deployed and installed anywhere, any number of times. You can also modify and adapt FreeCAD for your own purposes without any restriction. However, you cannot make the FreeCAD developers liable for possible damage or business loss that could occur from using FreeCAD.
FreeCad is very good but the CAM side can be a little bit tricky, check for updates.
The other free Cad and Cam is Onshape but your files are public other than that it is completely free to use with a great help system. Oh one other thing it is a network system but still fine.
PeterK
I have been using Path ( the CAM workbench in FreeCad) for about 2 yrs. I also have and use VCarve Pro, current release.
The following is my opinion, and we all know what people say about opinions…
These two definitely have a different user audience. Path I think is oriented to more of a Haas type machine … think cutting steel, adaptive tool paths, automatic tool changer, coolant, full 3D surfaces, etc. The learning curve can be high for folks new to CAD & CAM.
VCarve Pro is primarily what I would call 2.5D … 2D on multiple Z layers. But I agree the learning curve on VCarve is very short.
I will be using an Elite Foreman with an ATC (yes a work in progress)… FreeCad will be more at home with this sort of machine.
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Aiph5u
(Aiph5u (not affiliated with Onefinity))
30
Another popular free license is the CC license, which "is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted “work”.[a] A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author’s work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.[1][2][3][4][5]
So it’s always worth reading the individual license terms before using a licensed work, even it is a free license.
That’s super cool! I’ve been thinking of giving FreeCad a try (currently use Fusion360).
Fusion has been nice because there’s a machine and post processor available. Simply choose “Post Process” and it outputs an .nc file ready for my non-elite Journeyman. But with each change I worry we’ll loose more capabilities in the free version.
Can I ask how you are creating the .nc file from FreeCad?
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Aiph5u
(Aiph5u (not affiliated with Onefinity))
32
Yes the “Path Workbench” also has a post processor. I had the Journeyman you have for ~2 years … The machine I chose was “grbl”. My new machine will have the Masso and I hope a tool changer, with that in mind I will likely change output type (I wrote a post a few months ago on that topic, just can’t remember now)
As far as learning off of youtube, I like these two folks:
This guy “sliptonic”
is a minor FreeCad God … he heads up the Path Workbench, and leads a company (maybe non-profit) that provides 5 paid developers for FreeCad.
Ahh, that’s what I was wondering! I didn’t know whether FreeCAD had post processors (they do) and since I’d heard that the OneFinity controller was based on Buildbotics which was based on Camotics which was a fork of linuxCNC, I wondered if folks used GRBL or LinuxCNC…
I was just watching CNC with FreeCAD: CAD + CAM workflow from WayOfWood! It’s only 9 Minutes so I figured what the heck, although I had to slow it down at times so it’ll probably take me 15 or 20 haha. Already picked up a couple really useful tips - like using the spreadsheet workbench for parameters and using the Alias macro. I also found the Launcher widget that lets you just type in commands which is awesome when you’re having trouble finding it’s icon.
I literally was at the point where I’d switched my workbench to “Path”, switched to the “Output” tab and was looking at the “Processor” options in the dropdown list!
GRBL is free, open source software for controlling the motion of machines that move, that make things, or that make things move, and runs on wide variety of microcontrollers.
The first version of GRBL was released in 2009 by Simen Svale Skogsrud. It was later picked up and led by Sungeun “Sonny” Jeon Ph.D who evolved it into a highly capable machine control system running on the Arduino family of microcontroller boards. It makes incredibly efficient use of the 8-bit Atmel processors on the Arduinos and is an amazing feat of software engineering to get so much from such a humble processor.
Grbl is a no-compromise, high performance, low cost alternative to parallel-port-based motion control for CNC milling. It will run on a vanilla Arduino (Duemillanove/Uno) as long as it sports an Atmega 328.
The controller is written in highly optimized C utilizing every clever feature of the AVR-chips to achieve precise timing and asynchronous operation. It is able to maintain up to 30kHz of stable, jitter free control pulses.
It accepts standards-compliant g-code and has been tested with the output of several CAM tools with no problems. Arcs, circles and helical motion are fully supported, as well as, all other primary g-code commands. Macro functions, variables, and most canned cycles are not supported, but we think GUIs can do a much better job at translating them into straight g-code anyhow.
Grbl includes full acceleration management with look ahead. That means the controller will look up to 18 motions into the future and plan its velocities ahead to deliver smooth acceleration and jerk-free cornering.
