SketchUcam

[whirlybomber]

I just found another piece of CAM software and it seems to be released under the GPL.

I don't know anything about it and I haven't used it (since sketchup doesn't seem to be Linux-compatable).

Anyway, I found it here.

It seems to be maintained by people from the phlatboyz forums.

It might be worth having a look at to see how they approached various issues.

[quick61]

Yes, I know it and have used it. It's in Ruby, I believe, and is 2/2.5D with only basic functionality for 2.5D (vertical or horizontal passes only. For 2D routing it does a real decent job and is very easy to use. Set your tool, inside cut, outside cut, or plunge, then point and click. It dose not do waterline/contour, and does not support multiple tools in the same session. IMO, for the things they do alike, it's more useful than PyCAM. What Pycam can do that SketchUcam cant, (contour/waterline) it's not that big of a deal because who wants to wait for hours on end for PyCAM to calculate the contour of a simple part! OH, you could get it to go as fast as something like MeshCAM, (sense were talking about CAM programs that work on meshes here), but not many of us have a 512 core Beowulf cluster sitting around to run it on.

Speaking of MeshCAM, the guys working on FreeCAD CAM should take a look at that UI. The UI is very nice and UF, (User Friendly).

Mark