This was just announced on Reddit:
Looks pretty interesting — imports STLs and DXFs
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That is really fascinating!
A big reason why 3D printing is so entertaining is that you get those settings dialed in for the material and hit “slice”.
I’d be curious to hear what your initial thoughts about this are @WillAdams…? Seeing your vast knowledge of varying CAD/CAM programs.
I actually don’t know that much — I just list stuff on the pages:
and haven’t used that many, mostly because for various reasons, nothing quite suits.
Used to use MakerCAM, hand-coded some G-Code files, did one project where I used both MakerCAM and F-Engrave, started in on Carbide Create, bought Vectric VCarve for one project but found it fussy and haven’t used it since beyond testing, and used MeshCAM for a couple of traditional 3D projects, and have tried various programmatic things:
but nothing quite works the way I want to work, or affords exactly the capabilities I want w/ a license/source which works for my current situation.
Best thing I have going now is doing initial designs in BlockSCAD:
bringing them into OpenSCAD to use the Customizer:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/Customizer
then writing out DXFs or SVGs to import into Carbide Create which then have to have the geometry for each tool brought into register and Toolpaths assigned:
I wish FreeCAD were further along, I wish it was easier to install CADquery, I suppose I should try OnShape and FeatureScript (anyone know if the latter can write out an external file?), and I wish that OpenSCAD would gain the ability to write out text from the Log w/o the extra text which they insist on adding.
Ah well, there are a few other things I want to try — maybe something will pan out eventually.
It looks like it only supports print and println to the console, with no file IO.
If I recall correctly, with your OpenSCAD work, your models didn’t actually use any of the OpenSCAD generated shapes… rather they were functions of the form “draw it and also echo something that is like GCode for it”. So that there were two separate streams of construction - one, the visible model. The other, the GCode. Is that correct?
If so, perhaps what you need is a programmatic tool that lets you write out GCode only, and as a side effect, draws it.
If so - there’s enough skill on this forum to make such a thing.
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That’s the way I’ve been working, but it’s slow going — I’ve been experimenting w/ only having the G-Code, but it’s awkward finding tools which will correctly preview all the tooling which I wish to use, which circles back to OpenSCAD, but then the calculations get complicated and it bogs down.
Thanks for checking on Featurescript. Guess OnShape won’t work for me.
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