DXF to GCode Software

Software
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Just found this list of CAD-CAM free software.

http://replicat.org/generators

I’m going to give PyCam a go to generate some simple Gcode outlines for testing with a sharpie ;¬)

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PyCam is coming back to life! Looks like it’s at least some of the original developers. Many more options today, hope they succeed.

I spent some time with it back about 2011 it so, finally gave up when it kept taking incredible amounts of time, or locking up (might be I was too impatient, but did let it run overnight a few times) on pretty simple small projects. This was under Ubuntu (iirc, whatever was used for Linux CNC at the time) on a quad core AMD. Hope that got sorted out.

There was a PyCam fork in the idle period, don’t know what happened to that.

Let us know how it works out

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I spent the first half of this week buried in Linux dependencies and it did my head in, so when I went to install PyCam and it required loads of dependencies, I gave up and went for Heeks!

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Heeks was my favorite until I broke it, kept getting improper out of bounds errors. Filed a bug report, no resolution. Probably a library version dependency. Switched to the Russian Inkscape add-on gcodetools.

Iirc Heeks generates a program that it then compiles to generate the actual gcode, different from a postprocessor but with the same results.

At the time it was in the middle of an open source spat with several forks on different repositories. Dan reeled it back in under his control, but that’s when I got the 3D printer bug and mostly lost track. It was going to become the gcode engine for FreeCAD but when I last checked, some time ago, it still wasn’t working there.

Dan was asking a very reasonable $20 or so the last time I looked, well worth if it’s usable

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Does Inkscape with the tools perform well, with plenty of features for tool pathing etc?

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Not sure I’d say plenty of tools (it was 5 years ago) but it was usable for basic stuff. Not sure what state it’s in now, at the time the developers had an an English language forum and were good about answering questions