What can I use on Linux for a Shapeoko Pro?

[Moded1952 (Lucas)]

Not to speak for Will but I can answer and I figure he wouldn’t mind you getting feedback sooner rather than later.

@Tango

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?

Carbide Create does both CAM.

Carbide Create’s biggest limitation is that it operates in 2D. If your design can be expressed by stacking 2D cuts, it’ll work. If it can’t, it won’t.

Whether that’ll be a problem for you will depend on what you’re making. For example this box for Valentine’s day should be totally doable in Carbide Create (he may have done so, I wasn’t sure though). Stuff like this and this can be made by cutting multiple 2D pieces then joining them together.

However stuff with 3D geometry that has slopes and curves like this or this can’t really be done in the standard version of Carbide Create. It can however be done in the upgraded Carbide Create Pro, though you need to figure out how to turn your STL into a heightmap so you can import it.

Carbide 3D also supplies MeshCAM, I believe. That program operates in 3D.

@Tango

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.)

“Carbide Motion” refers to two things:

• The PC software that talks to your Shapeoko or Nomad.
• The circuit board that runs GRBL, hidden away in a box on your machine.

Will’s referring to the latter here.

@Tango

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?

The “program that talks directly to the CNC” is the G-code sender. I suspect Will’s talking about accessing Carbide Motion over VNC here.

But I’ll again point to CNCjs:

• The CNCjs server runs on the Raspberry Pi, which talks directly to the CNC.
• The CNCjs interface runs in any web browser that has access to the same network.

So your latter ask is basically satisfied by CNCjs: your workstation can access CNCjs through a browser, upload G-code to it, tell it to run the G-code, move the machine around, or anything else a G-code sender on the Pi could ask the Pi to do.