I too am a Mac user. Up until recently I have been using Geomagic Design (formerly Alibre Design) for CAD and mostly Sheetcam for CAM. Both of these apps are Windows based. I run Windows7 as an application on MacOS - as god intended ;-) with Parallels. Geomagic and Sheetcam are pretty much the only thing I run under Windows.
A few months ago when I read that Fusion had released their turning CAM and made Fusion 360 free for enthusiasts and small businesses I gave it another try (had played with early beta but found it lacking). I have now begun to use Fusion 360 almost exclusively. I have most recently been making parts for a cnc lathe so I haven’t played with the milling CAM yet, but do intend to. After months of using it I believe I am not going to renew my maintenance of Geomagic Design. I have to say that I was very reluctant to use a cloud-based application but I am quite pleased with Fusion 360 and have never had issues relating to it’s cloud-based model (you can do most things when offline as well). I am constantly amazed at the features in the software as well as the integrated HSMWorks-based CAM software that is available for free in this package. It is also constantly being improved and updated, they do a feature and bug release at least once a month. sometime twice a month. I also infrequently use OnShape (also cloud based) and am very impressed with their collaboration features and rapid updates as well. OnShape is CAD only and doesn’t have free integrated CAM so I have been using it less and less but occasionally use it with colleagues to work on some things. You can purchase commercial CAM packages for it. I would highly recommend you check out Fusion 360. -Tom > On Jan 30, 2016, at 12:03 PM, Chris Albertson <albertson.ch...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > What are people here using to create G-code? I am looking for options. > > I'm new to CNC and trying to develop a work flow. I'm making small parts > (most fit in a 3" cube) for robot manipulators. These can be designed > for easy manual machining but now I want to add curves and arcs and later > add refinements that have more organic shapes. Qualities are as much as a > half dozen each. > > I use ViaCAD. It is very much identical to "TurboCAD" to make 3D drawings > and these can be saved in several different file formats. > > I found PyCAM. It will read STL files and make G-code. Are there other > options? Can you really build good G-code from STL? It seems STL has no > notion of arcs and hols and pockets. It is all triangles. Does this > matter? > > I'm doing the design work on a Apple iMac and of course the machine > controller is Linux. Any workflow that uses either of those two OSes is > fine, as I've had long experience with both. > > -- > > Chris Albertson > Redondo Beach, California ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=267308311&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
