Brad Collette (“Sliptonic”) posted about the toolpath challenge for the new wave of less-expensive 5-axis machines that appear to be poised to enter the market:
That’s a great post. I just wish FreeCAD’s CAM workbench UI was less confusing. Creating/using a tool bit library is overwhelming. Me has the dumb, apparently.
I admit that setting up my own tool bit library is where I also ran aground. Deciding on a system for sanely numbering my tools was where I just ran out of steam…
Well, I did look at the numbering thing here a while back:
One notable failing is that it is oriented towards Imperial (if someone wants to work up a metric version, I’d be glad of it).
If someone wants to implement this in FreeCAD’s CAM Workbench, I’d be quite gratified.
If someone can come up w/ a metric alternative, I’d be quite interested.
Yeah, and I was in that thread. I run metric by preference but have both metric and imperial tooling, which was where my imagination ran dry… 
I’m down for brainstorming and working up a metric alternative.
That sounds like the Dewey Decimal System for tool bits. Great! But the problem I ran into wasn’t so much one of naming my bits as simply getting each type defined. I just hit a wall after a flat end mill. Never mind v-bits of different degrees, ball nose and tapered ball nose bits. If there was a way to define them it escaped me. And then being able to take it with me to different machines. EstlCam handles this pretty well, and I’d recommend it to anyone instead of FreeCAD CAM for simple stuff, but it is proprietary and Windows only. But it has some UI weaknesses too, that I found myself doing things twice (or more) which was frustrating.