I could work on FreeCad now as long as I kept away from the CAM side.
TBH though every time I have tried FreeCad I've ended up wanting to tear
my hair out (what little I have left). That doesn't really give me a big
incentive to work on it. Although I'm not keen on Autodesk's policies I
mostly end up modelling in Fusion. The free personal use CAD is fine for
anything I want to do. The CAM however is crippled to the point of being
useless.
My code is designed with a well defined split between GUI and path
engine so moving the engine to FreeCad in the future should be
relatively painless for someone. All the FreeCad plugin has to do is
feed it the various configuration parameters and a mesh. It spits out
paths and/or g-code.
Currently the path engine provides similar functionality to OpenCamLib
which FreeCad's path workbench already uses. It is however a lot faster.
Unlike OCL it only supports ball, bull nose and flat end mills.
This is just a fun project to see what I could knock up in a few days. I
have no idea if it will actually go anywhere.
Les
On 12/10/2026 18:36, andrew beck wrote:
Awesome.
So in 6months you could work on freecad lol😁😁
On Mon, 12 Oct 2026, 11:06 pm Les Newell, <[email protected]>
wrote:
There's about 6 months left on it. It may be difficult to enforce or
even invalid but I signed the contract so I'll stick by it. That's just
the way I am.
Les
On 12/10/2026 10:51, Gregg Eshelman via Emc-users wrote:
How long was the term of the non-compete clause? An indefinite term is
widely held to be illegal in the USA. The reasonableness test generally
limits the term to between 6 months to 2 years.
Some states outright ban non-competes.
Give that contract another look, especially if it's been 2+ years. Look
up your State's laws and rules on non-compete clauses. That clause might
never have been valid.
On Monday, October 12, 2026 at 02:48:32 AM MDT, Les Newell <
[email protected]> wrote:
Going back to the original question I thought it would be fun to see
what Claude AI could create. In a day I had a GUI and basic 3D parallel
machining with roughing and finish strategies. All vibe coded with
probably 3-4 hours of my time actually spent working on it. The rest was
doing other stuff while the AI did it's thing. I haven't even looked at
the code let alone written any.
The next day I put in another couple of hours and had much improved
parallel machining and waterline. The g-code files are pretty huge ATM
because it's all short line segments but it won't take much to add arc
matching for G02/G03. That should massively reduce the line count.
Unfortunately I can't release any of the code. When I sold SheetCam the
contract included a non-compete clause.
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