Recommended CAM applications

What Kind of CAM applications do you use or recommend besides LaserWeb, Cam.Openbuild and Fusion 360? Even commercial ones?

Here are two great places to start looking.

https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/CAM
https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/Commercial_Software

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I mostly use the CAM in Inventor, but one simple to use CAM for milling is Estlcam (see: http://www.estlcam.de/).

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I can second Estlecam, good little program. If you have a couple of thousand to spend, there is always Aspire, it does EVERYTHING you could ever want.

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FreeCAD has a Path workbench that lets you generate toolpaths. But if you don’t design your model in it, then that doesn’t make any sense. I’ve been meaning to give Kiri:Moto a serious try because it looks like it could do quite a bit, but my maker hobbies have all been put on the back burner for now (20 month old daughter, work, etc.).

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Thanks for your reply @SirGeekALot. :slight_smile: Have you already used Kiri:Moto?

Not really. I’ve played with it a bit but I haven’t really used it to generate the gcode for an actual project. As I said, pretty much all my “maker activities” are on hold right now (due to toddler/work duties).

Freecad’s path workbench has improved quite a bit with the 0.19 release, although it still doesn’t make much sense to use it if you didn’t use freecad to make the part in the first place. It now has a pretty good adaptive toolpath strategy, that if you have adaptive speed control (feed and speed) could be pretty useful.

Pretty sure I’ve seen people mentioning the .STEP import for FreeCAD is reasonable. Haven’t tried that out myself though for the CAM bits, but I was kind of thinking it might make sense for people used to a CAD package with no CAM capabilities at all.