I have seen pyCAM in my bookmarks - I haven’t had time to look it over. The advantage to BlenderCAM is that I could use that in Blender on Linux without issue. Again, the Linux workstation is a short-term solution. (And I’m betting pyCAM is OS agnostic, too.)
Having it work with WINE would be nice. Just for my education, what kind of thing would not work well with Carbide Create? I probably should look this up, but isn’t that for the design work? Or does it do the CAM work, too, then I take the output and use UGS or the Pi version of Carbide Motion?
You mention a board. Do you mean in the Shapeoko or is there a board I can get for that to put in a computer? (I’m assuming you mean the Shapeoko logic board.) When you talk about using a Pi and communicating with the Pi over network, do you mean just using something like VNC to control a g-code sender, or is there some other way to do this, with the sender on a workstation, sending information to a program on the Pi that talks directly to the CNC?