I make lovely 3D printed gears using Gearotic, and now I’d like to create some on my new Nomad. All of the gears I make are simple 2D outlines, or perhaps 2 1/2 D if there is a collar. I imagine I could export them from Gearotic as STL and then import them into MeshCAM; I haven’t tried that yet. But that seems overkill for what is inherently at most a 2 1/2 D object. Has anyone come up with a way to get simple gears from Gearotic into Carbide Create?
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Gearotic seems oriented towards complex gear geometries which have to be represented in 3d which Carbide Create can’t handle. Does it not have a DXF export option?
The community has a list of other programs at: https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/CAM#Gears which includes:
which will make an SVG which imports well into Carbide Create.
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There are some nice (free) plugins for Fusion360 that do this.
Thanks for this info; I’ll check them out. Gearotic does export DXF files, but when I try to read the file with Carbide Create I get unfathomable error messages, so there is some sort of incompatibility between the two programs. Abandoning Gearotic is my last resort, as I’ve used it for years and am familiar with it. But I’m open to other possibilities if needed.
I just discovered an awkward but usable workaround for this problem, and I’ll report it here in case it can help someone else trying to do this. . I export the DXF from Gearotic and import that file into a 3D CAD program. I used 123D Design, but I suspect any such program would work. Then I immediately export it from the CAD program as an SVG file. Create has no trouble reading that file correctly, and I can set up a nice toolpath that way.
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Similar is opening the DXF in LibreCAD, then immediately exporting to a MakerCAM SVG.