V0.9Beta of my free 4 Axis CAM Now allows roughing in addition to finishing

V0.9Beta of my free 4 Axis CAM

Now allows roughing in addition to finishing operations (including layer height and skin thickness).
Cleaned up and more modular and structured user interface.
Now allows entering feed rates for cutting and free movement.

There’s not terribly much left to be done for version 1.0. :slight_smile:
http://code.google.com/p/simplemultiaxiscam/downloads/detail?name=MultiAxisGCode_v0.9beta.jar

what roughing strategy did you implement?
The usual way is to “slice” the model, i.e. produce waterline paths, and then run a pocketing operation on the waterline (+ some stock model in some cases).
The advanced pocketing algorithms try to limit the cutter-engagement somehow. I’ve tried this with a medial-axis based approach:

For a very first version I applied the same algorithm as for finishing with a limit in Z.
It will mill faces multiple times and waste time.
Next will be to replace all cutting above the last layer height with a single move to the safe height, job to the new location and move down again.

Wow, I just got an offer for some compensation to continue working on this.
(I’m still waiting for the CAM API in FreeCAD to be ready to resume.)