Anybody know good CAM software for Linux/Ubuntu ? There are lots of it, to just cut, but I need something to “remove material” outside/inside drawing…
Can’t help you with ‘good’. Pycam can be made to work, although generally you’ll have to do a lot of editing. cambam is pretty good but it’s not free and there’s no trial version for linux so you’re limited to the full version with restricted output. That’s all I’ve used.
thx for answer. I will try pycam. Too bad that there is nothing ‘good’ for linux. I even considering buy something but it must be native for linux…
Ok, pycam installed… now I really need some tutorial ;)))))
Go to the ‘tools’ tab and define some new ones that actually reflect what you have: cylindrical, with reasonable diameters and feed rates. Then go to the ‘settings’ menu item and ‘save task settings’. That way you can reload those and get back your actual tools every time you use it. Load an STL, shift it downwards so the topmost point is at or below 0 (because otherwise sometimes it’ll process it from the backside.) If you’re doing subtractive machining like with a mill or router you probably want to use the ‘model extensions’ option on the first tab to build shaker tabs to keep the material attached to the clamping system. Mess with those and I can answer future questions. I warn you it crashes sometimes and when you use the ‘contour’ strategy the top and bottom layers will be fine but all the layers in between are completely insane so you’ll end up editing the gcode and removing all them.
by the way basically you proceed across the tabs. Do what you need in ‘model’ then go to ‘tools’ and so forth until you get to the last one, and generate your toolpaths. (that step is slow.)
Cambam works by a completely different organizational scheme and doesn’t use STL’s.
OK, I just generate some gcode, and it looks ok. But when I load some real world job, and try to ‘calculate path’ only for rought job, it eats all of my 16g of ram, start to swap and then display error that I have not enaught mem on my system installed… omg, really ? 
Wow, that’s crazy. How many lines of gcode did it produce? Mine will often produce like maybe 1000 lines, which my system has no problem running.
example - about 250, but “real job” - don’t know, it hangs out 
ok, there was a memory leak in pycam 0.5.1 when using with python2.7. I apply simple patch (just add pool.terminate() in threading.py) and it works like a charm now
I will look out for that!
At a maker fair yesterday a guy recommended http://www.sheetcam.com/downloads and I just realized it has a linux version. Will try and report.
Will be waiting for that report sir I just try FreeCAD + PyCAM and it seems to work. I will try feed my grbl controller with gcode produced with PyCAM tomorow 