FreeCAD integration

[markus]

I don't know how many here use FreeCAD for their CAD and/or CAM work.
In case you do or are planning to, I started writing a workbench which
basically is a (simple) Machinekit UI embedded in FreeCAD.

It is far from complete but it has become quite useful to me.
Everything I machine is practically a one off, and being able to
directly push the job, setup/touch off the tool and execute the task
from FreeCAD has streamlined my workflow. Most of all, I find seeing the
live feedback of the tool in relation to the model and g-code extremely
helpful.

Besides, it was/is a lot of fun to reverse engineer the different
services and interact with them :)

In case you're interested, the workbench is on github:
https://github.com/mlampert/Machinekit-Workbench

Comments and feedback are welcome.

Cheers,
Markus

[markus]

forgot to add the link for a little demo:
http://bibi.ca/download/machinekit/machinekit-wb.mp4

same demo as animated gif version if you prefer that
http://bibi.ca/download/machinekit/machinekit-wb.gif

[Bas de Bruijn]

Hi Markus,
Great project!
That looks like it took a lot of work.

Bas

>
> Cheers,
> Markus
>
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[markus]

> Hi Markus,
> Great project!
> That looks like it took a lot of work.
>
> Bas

Thanks very much. It was a bit of work, but not too bad. I'm fairly new
to Machinekit and so I didn't just have to figure out the protocol but
also how Machinekit works. What was really helpful is the Machinekit
image which I installed on a PocketBeagle with mkwrapper-sim, which
gave me a portable development platform to try things out.

Luckily I've done some FreeCAD development before so that side of it
was almost straight forward.

Markus

[Michael Brown]

Hi Markus

Brilliant work.

I'm also a 1 off job Freecad user and find your addition very welcome :-)

I have put it on my task list of things todo when I come out of vacation mode.

Best Wishes

Michael Brown