PyCAM

[Scott Kovaleski]

Anyone out there monkeying about with PyCAM? I tried to set it up on my Mac and failed. Then thought it might be pretty hip to have a dedicated Raspberry Pi for my new ShapeOko CNC (early Christmas for me). I think I got all the dependencies installed on the RasPi, but it no worky.

I unpacked pycam in my home directory and tried to run it there. No luck, it couldnt import the first package. I edited my PYTHONPATH and it found that package, but couldn't open the GUI.

I am going to get the RasPi set up to run headless, with a GUI on my Mac, so I should be able to bring it to the next hack night. If someone thinks they can help at hack night, I would appreciate a shout out. If pycam sucks and I should be using something way better, I would love to know what that is too.

P.S. Any discussion on voting to get space at the last hack night?

[Brad Collette]

Pycam does some interesting tool paths but I eventually abandoned it. The python is so slow for certain operations that it's almost unusable. (think in terms of hours or days to generate a surface)

HeeksCNC is still my go-to tool for cam. Building it on Mac is a biatch.

We're getting closer to a cam Workbench for FreeCAD though. Then life will be good.

[Scott Kovaleski]

So it sounds like CAM is too computationally intensive for raspberry pi?

I'll take a look at heeksCNC. How close is the FreeCAD add on?

Dr. Scott Kovaleski

Associate Professor

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of Missouri

349 Engineering Building West

Columbia, MO 65211

Ph: 573-882-8377

Fx: 573-882-0397

koval...@missouri.edu

highvoltage.missouri.edu

[Brad Collette]

cam is necessarily too tough for the PI but pycam is grossly inefficient.  Even on a quad-core desktop, it's a pooch.  FreeCAD is moving fast but not anywhere near usable.  Focus right now is on the API and getting a plugin architecture working.  

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Brad Collette
573-427-7132

[Brad Collette]

To clarify; you might find that the 2.5D stuff in pycam is usable.  Profiling and possibly pocketing.  It's when you try to do true 3D surfacing that it really struggles.

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Brad Collette
573-427-7132

[Scott Kovaleski]

I'm not finding much info on installing HeeksCNC. Some questions:

1) Dependencies?
2) Do I need HeeksCAD installed first?
3) Where is the most up to date code? I found stuff on google code, git, heeks.net, etc.
4) You mention installing on MacOS is tough. I have seen a couple of forum posts from people having "success" but I haven't found an installation guide. Has anyone seen something like this?

[Brad Collette]

Heekscnc is a plugin for Heekscad so you need them both.  

Dan Heeks has the "official" code here: http://code.google.com/p/heekscnc/ with HeeksCAD here: http://code.google.com/p/heekscad/

The dependencies are python, wxgtk, gtkglext1, libboost, ftgl, and  opencascade.  It is (or at least was) buildable also with OCE (the community version of opencascade).

Once you get heekscad loading and finding the heekscnc plugin, you'll also need libarea: http://code.google.com/p/libarea/  Libarea is a really important library that does the actual tool path generation.  We're reusing libarea in the FreeCAD replacement.

Dan occasionally fixes a bug but has mostly stopped developing .  The speculation is that he got a girlfriend but no one can confirm this :-)  A version of the code also exists on github and I'm the guy who's been trying to keep it in shape.  It has a couple bug fixes not found in Dan's version but these are almost exclusively related to linux.

Another friend of mine was one of the guys trying to make it work on Mac.  I'll chat with him tonight and see if he has any advice.

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Brad Collette
573-427-7132

[Nathan Odle]

Scott, just to throw this out there - if you ever decide to try the commercial route, and want to borrow some of the training materials I bought awhile back for MasterCAM, let me know.  It is one of the main commercial packages out there, and while pretty pricey it is really quite good.  It took me awhile to learn but it'll do just about anything.  While it's often used in industry with Fadal, Heidenhain, and other fancy controls there are post-processors ('posts') available for Mach3 and I believe also LinuxCNC so it's good for hobbyist machines too.  Since you're at Mizzou you can contact them for academic pricing also.

There are some other commercial CAM packages out there that are pretty decent.  BobCAD/CAM is one of the more popular ones, a little cheaper than MasterCAM with a pretty huge academic discount.  For free, you can get CamBam which is 2.5D for router-type machines and a lot of people seem to like it.

None of this is to downplay the hard work that Brad and others have put in on the open-source options.  I personally am not ready to use any of the open-source stuff but it's improving all the time.