Is there anything in terms of free software for 4 and 5 axis milling

Is there anything in terms of free software for 4 and 5 axis milling?

do you mean CAM-software for generating G-code from CAD-data?
or a CNC-control that takes G-code and drives motors for a 3/4 axis machine?

Check out TinyG if it’s the latter. (look up Synthetos/TinyG on github)

CAM of cause.
Machine control is trivial.

PyCAM does 3-axis work acceptably (better than any other open-source CAM i’ve seen). Or at least it did back in the 0.5 days, I have not tried 0.6 yet. 0.5 had plenty of wrinkles to work around, but i did successfully make parts using it. http://pycam.sourceforge.net/

@Alden_Hart thanks for the pointer to TinyG, I had not seen that before. I don’t understand why people reimplement machine controllers and gcode interpreters instead of just using LinuxCNC, but i guess i’m a bit biased :wink:

I don’t need 3 axis g-code. I’m asking for 4 and 5 axis.
The interesting stuff. :wink:

My experience is very few people have capable 4/5-axis machines in their shop and at the same time are not rich enough to just buy a commercial CAM solution. Additionally you’d have to be an individual with an inclination towards math/geometry/coding to make this happen - I think that’s partly why we haven’t seen open-source 4/5-axis much yet.

I’d suggest we make 3-axis work really well first! I have preliminary work on opencamlib and openvoronoi (see github). From time to time there is someone who might be interested in making a GUI for these libraries but nothing has materialized yet (I have obviously not done a GUI myself either…)

this is roughly what my GPL libraries can do right now:
http://www.anderswallin.net/cam/
no user-interface, no GUI, just c++ code with python bindings and a heap of python scripts.

@Anders_Wallin well…I’m a professional, freelancing software developer with a 4 Axis CNC, an itch to scratch and studied math as the chosen minor subject for my computer science diploma.
Most of the code for some 4 axis testing was done today in a few hours during a train ride.

Have you looked at APT360? I am pretty sure it 4 & 5 axis capable.
http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?AptProgrammingForEMC

@Martin_Parrott from the description and the screen shots it’s a programming language. Not something to dump your model file, machine definition and tools into and in the end get g-code for MACH3.

Yes, it seems nice for manually programming mathematical surfaces but would not be usable if your model comes from CAD.