Spent some time yesterday dinking with estlcam’s vcarving on my undersized 3018, and have mixed feelings. First, as always, really don’t like video manuals (knew that going in), OK for tutorials, close to worthless when you want to go look up details on a setting.
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Sorry dlang, gotten into the faceplant ctrl-cr new paragraph habit, which this forum treats as submit, so a new post since and don’t reach email.
The basic editing is pretty clumsy compared to, say Carbide Create or Gearotic’s Vexx, even ignoring no undo.
Outside vcarve did very well, once I figured out how to only pocket the area I wanted to.
Regular vcarve, well, sucked. Barely touched the surface with the same settings. Used the default depth of just over 4mm with a 1/4 shank 60 degree bit, got maybe a mm or so of actual depth. Flipped the board over and used Carbide Create’s vcarve, first time success. First time CC vcarve and used it’s defaults - which were pretty much nothing since it determines the depth from the space between the two lines automatically. Estlcam was probably a setting, but not well covered in the video or found in the tooltip popups.
I intend to practice more with estlcam, of course, and I was more interested in it’s 3D features since I’ve got 2.5D pretty well covered. Knee is getting better and chair sitting time is still increasing, but am still limited to an hour or two at a time of routering.
Darn ctl-cr. While trying to go back and edit my inside vcarve (I had one job with inside stacked over outside to fit my test 1x4 piece) it let me open the settings for the outside version, then when I clicked on the inside carve setup it delete everything in the project. Poof, gone. Of course I hadn’t practiced save early, save often, since it was just a quickie test of vcarving the word v-carve. Decided the knee had had enough and walked away. This kind of bug in a version 11 is, well, lets just say it lacks some polish.
Estlcam has a place in my toolbox, but as it’s second most expensive software tool (gearotic is first and worth every penny and more) I’m not as impressed as I could be. Don’t begrudge the price, understand it’s a one person shop, but so is Art Fenerty’s Gearotic…
Hi David,
That is what I was wondering. I did create a sub profile for the Maslow based upon the GRBL preset. However, I have not determined how to modulate the speed. I have spent some time on it without success. The designer openly offers to create profiles for new machines. However, I do not feel I am the right person to provide the correct information to him in order to get the best outcome. I think it would benefit us all if one the highly knowledgeable experts from this community could be tapped to undertake working with the designer.
I’ll ask estlcam what info they need and see what he says.
so, one thing is that the maslow supports G2/G3 arcs (at least the versions that
use IJ, not the versions that use R)
estlcam can create tons of super short movements, any movement below ~0.1mm is a
waste of time, the machine isn’t that precise (IIRC, the report was 0.01mm
movements)
The maslow can do tool changes, which grbl cannot.
I don’t know enough about Estlcam to know what else needs to be set, but I would
be willing to discuss what things can be set and what would be appropriate.
David Lang
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That is great guys, I think it will end up helping many maslow users. I am having zero luck speeding up the cutting, Even a simple file wilth 4 small pockets is extremely slow no matter what settings I try.
After some false starts I found a decent stl file to test with, looks kind of like billy bass in a pond. Success! Only did a 30x40x4mm carving in poplar with a finishing ball nose bit a little too large, but came out pretty nice and only took 20 minutes or so for both passes on my dinky non-maslow 3018. I suspect it’s waterfall cutting, with limited Z movement, could work pretty well on a Maslow as long as the work is sized to work with the sled.
I need to do a comparison with kiri:moto first in another support forum but plan to flip the test board over and do a bigger and longer try on it’s backside with the winner of that face off
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Where will you post the comparison? 
@Metalmaslow I found this about a month ago and went to your page and saw they were still available. I did a quick trial of ESTLCam on a nativity cut, and rather liked it. I didn’t purchase the license then as I was going on vacation, and I just went back to the page to buy one and saw you are Out of Stock. Are you planning on getting any more? If so, when by chance? If not, no worries, just curious.
sorry no, we bought the licenses @ $39 each and resold for $1 more and even with that break even pricing there was so little demand it took me a year to sell only quantity of 40.
gotta focus on stuff that community wants and is profitable. I think it is $60 direct, i bet if you told him you’d make some youtube demo videos or something he might give you a $20 off.
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@Metalmaslow Hey, now worries! I thought it might have been a deal that you had worked out to get a bulk set of licenses to sell. I was just curious if you would be able to get them again. I completely understand the need to meet the market and customer/community needs, and there is no use in providing something that is very low demand and how that can strain a business. I just wish I hadn’t waited so long to try and pull the trigger.
I have no issue in paying the $60, but as most, I would really have no issue if I could get that same thing for $20 less! I am not that fancy (or comfortable) to attempt demo videos on the YouTubes, so looks like I’ll have to pay the $60. But for some CAM software, that is a pretty good deal to get the options and capabilities that others provide for much much more. Still a deal in my book.
Thanks for the response!!
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I must have bought one of the last licenses, but I like estlcam- a lot and use it regularly.
Inferring from your comment, do you use other software for g code generation?
@Blair When I first got my Maslow I was working to learn Fusion360, but then they went and changed everything for how they classify users and the capabilities provided for that level (limited the “free” home use/hobbyist level from having the full capabilities I started out with), so I went looking for alternates. I was able to get my wife (an educator) to get an Easel account to open that up fully and they advertise they have a Maslow PP, and from one of the other posts, it had a “how to” for going from JPEG->GCode using InkScape and EsltCAM, so I thought I would try that. @Metalmaslow I believe had the link to this post about getting the license.
I have also been looking at the V1 MPCNC, and in their documentation, they also recommended using EstlCAM, so I figured if there are 2 separate CNC communities recommending it, then it can’t be that bad.
you could try carbide create. It is free. I found it less intuitive than estlcam, but got it to work also. There are example step-by-step writeups in the wiki posts for both carbide create and estlcam that you can look for or search for.
I tried F360 for about a minute. I’ve been using another 2/3D cad program for about 30 years now and decided I didn’t really want to learn a new program and have the rug pulled out like you had. And this was about 2 years ago. Check out TuboCad. I use the Deluxe version and it does pretty much everything I’ve needed.
I’ve been watching the MPCNC develop over the past couple of years. It’s the documentation and support has grown immensely. I tried printing the parts a while ago and failed miserably. I have extremely high and uncontrollable humidity during the summer and that was a major factor. So far I’ve printed a couple of pieces plus the test fixture and it’s going well. As I type I’m in the first 1/3rd of printing the main z mount. Cura says 2+ days but I expect closer to 3 days.
I really like Marlin. It’s an interesting thought experiment to see the Maslow supported on that platform.
I agree about Carbide Create not being intuitive. To me that’s a major advantage of Estlcam. I tried CC for about 2 days and still wasn’t happy with the results. I tried Estlcam and had a satisfactory product after a couple of hours.
I really like Marlin. It’s an interesting thought experiment to see the Maslow supported on that platform.
I have been slowly learning Marlin and understanding how to compile (I have a very long road ahead to completely understand it) but there seems to be a large following for it now, especially with the affordability for everyone to get their own 3D printer now. I feel Arduino was the same, but with the rapidly expanding availability of Marlin flavored boards, I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone on here with way more coding experience to look at that. I think the issues I’ve seen in some of the discussions on here were the ability to change to the stepper motors (the various NIMA type motors that are out there) vice the motors we have running the chains to move our little machine.