Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41467268

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27645605

This was a resource which was mentioned on the Shapeoko wiki --- while it's off-line, it's still on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20211127090321/https://wiki.shap...

Since then, some of those pages have been made available on Reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/hobbycnc/wiki/index

https://old.reddit.com/r/shapeoko/wiki (ob. discl., I work for Carbide 3D)

And there have been a number of other developments

- FreeCAD has hugely improved since that was written.

- Solvespace as greatly improved, adding some basic CAM functionality

- Blender has had the Solvespace sketcher ported to it as https://www.cadsketcher.com/ and BlenderCAM has gotten quite a bit more workable

- Dune3D was created and is remarkably capable: https://dune3d.org/

Also a fair number of forums discussing CNC were gathered at: https://forum.makerforums.info/

Right. This article is (2015).

3D printing with PLA has improved in the intervening decade. You can usually get a good print on good modern printers. The first generation of those things had poor extruders, and filament formulation has reportedly improved. There's complicated heat transfer going on in those things. You're welding a hot thing to a cold thing, which is inherently troublesome. I'm told that works better now.

Machining resin molds is straightforward, because you start with a block of something and machine only its top. So there's no work-holding problem. Trying to figure out how to clamp something that needs to be machined on several sides is usually hard.

Not sure what's going on in tiny mills today. I've used Tormachs, the whole range of Shopbots, and some strange one-off machines that TechShop somehow obtained. (Never did use the beautiful little Pocket 5-axis machine. TheShop had one just before they went bankrupt.)

These also had discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679939

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34339459

"GatorCAM for CNC"

Instructions to download: https://youtu.be/hqyPzCKGUQc?si=VJ0KRhQOl_-d7Bmm

Download here: https://sites.google.com/view/gatorcam/home

Very user friendly. Tab support, v-bit, ATC, sorts toolpaths for faster carving.

awesome dump, thanks for sharing. solvespace is cool but until they iron out the chamfer/fillet situation and parametric input I ll have to continue using freecad..

If you want something lighter than FreeCAD I'd recommend trying Dune3D --- it's amazingly easy/nice to use.

I ll give it a shot, tnx

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