Writing G codes for manufacturing components from your design can be very time-consuming and may consume a lot of resources from your workforce. CNC router software is basically designed to generate G codes based on your design. You can also expect design optimization for particular manufacturing technique from the software. Following is the list of few of the best picked CNC router software.
Apr 08, 2020 The Orion Motor Tech laser cutter is a high-quality laser cutting machine that can fit on your desktop. This compact machine offers a cutting area of 300 x 200 mm, a resolution ratio of 4500 dpi and a maximum speed of 80 mm/s when cutting. The Orion laser cutter operates with a 40W water cooling laser tube and a high-precision stepping motor. Jun 27, 2020 The software that you use with a laser cutter should be compatible with various platforms and operating systems. If you predominantly use a Mac then your laser cutter software that is only available on Windows and Linux isn’t going to be problematic. Luckily both Muse and Glowforge use software that is compatible with a variety of platforms. The #1 vinyl cutter software for macOS and Windows. DOWNLOAD NOW Requires Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7, Vista, XP (33.8 MB) DOWNLOAD NOW Requires Mac OS X 10.6 to 10.15 (37.3 MB). Last stable version: latest All versions: github.com/arkypita/LaserGRBL Also source code of LaserGRBL is available under GPLv3 license. LaserGRBL is free.
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EnRoute
EnRoute is a CAD/CAM sign making and digital finishing software solution. The software is paid software with the basic version offering features for design, toolpathing, 3D surfacing, Nesting, and production. The long list of features include a complete set of 2D CAD and editing tools, interlocking components creator, 3D relief surface cutting, carve into the surface, true shape nesting with 3 nesting engines, nest near obstructions, and save and reuse toolpaths for fast workflow.
CNC Machine
ConstruCAM 3D works with only one unitary data file- click and go. The software provides an interface for most of the standard formats, thus data can be adopted from AutoCad, coreIDRAW, and ADOBE Illustrator. The software has a long list of features including construction aids, editing, layer technique, tool administration, lines, cubic splines and complex pre-defined elements. The software has integrated “Relief” module to convert 2D or .stl file into 3D file.
Software For Laser Cutting
Mozaik CNC
The CNC router software from Mozaik will take you from design to fully developed machine ready G-code with ease. Few of the features from the long list of this software offers are huge pre-defined parts giving you almost all the parts ready for drag-and-drop, intelligent joinery, intelligent algorithms to get optimized nesting, and the ability to control localized nesting. The software is available with a price tag.
LinuxCNC
LinuxCNC is the software designed specifically for Linux platform for controlling CNC operations. The software can be used to drive milling machines, lathes, 3d printers, and laser and plasma cutters. The software accepts G-code as input and drives CNC Machine in response. You can select your preferred GUI from a variety of GUIs. The software supports rigid tapping, cutter compensation, and many other advanced control features. This software is an open source CNC controller.
CAMotics for Mac
Camotics is the CNC router software basically designed for Mac platform users. Camotics is open source software which simulates 3 axis CNC milling or engraving. Being able to simulate is the critical part of creating CNC tool-paths, and programming without simulating is just like cutting without taking measurements. With Camotics you can preview your cutting operation before you actually start the operation. This allows you to improve your design or optimize manufacturing process before the actual manufacturing begins.
Easy CNC for Windows
Easy CNC is the CNC router software basically designed for Windows platform users. Few of the features that this software offer includes full implementation in C++, compiling and loading with Arduino IDE, Doxygen documentation, G-code interpreter, High modularity with object oriented programming, and firmware support for RAMPS 14.
Best CNC Router Software – GRZ CNC Software
GRZ CNC Software is the most popular software in the CNC router software category. The goal of development of this software is getting direct G codes ready for machining from your designs. Meshcam supports almost all the 3D drawing formats, plus it supports reading from a .dwg format to feature designs from drawings. The software also has an automatic toolpath wizard to get you machined workpiece without implementing time and knowledge for the manufacturing process.
How to install CNC Router Software?
Many of the CNC router software listed above offer a setup file, allowing an easy installation of the software. Few of the software in this category are portable, giving you access from anywhere with just one requirement of bootable USB device. CNC router software is basically designed for getting simulation before running actual machining process to get an idea of the performance and let you optimize the process before actually starting the process. Best free video stabilization software for mac.
While some software in this category offers free service for the basic need of getting simulation, the number of features gets limited for the free version. If you are looking for fully featured software with advanced features like automatic G-code generator and optimization, the paid ones are for you. Each software offering some unique feature over others, it’s the question of personal preferences for selecting one of the best software listed here.
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It's summer! The sun is shining, people are leaving their houses and everybody is outside having fun.. so I did what every self-respectable geek does: I bought myself a gadget :-).
I always wanted to own a powerful laser cutter that will cut up to 1' acrylic/wood, but my gadget-budget is no where near reachable for a commercial product.
Luckily, china is offering some really cheap DIY kits. These have no where near the power and capabilities that I would like to have, but the nice thing about DIY projects is that you can change them. You can hack, modify and extend them and you will gain a lot of hands-on experience that would miss by buying an off the shelf product.
So, I started looking for a >2W laser that uses an opensource controller (Arduino) and has some decent stepper motors (Nema17) and is easily hackable. I found a banggood.com kit and decided to pull the trigger..
Arrival
Laser Cutter Software For Mac Windows 10
The kit itself was delivered with within 3 weeks, which is not bad for a free shipping product from Shanghai. All parts were packaged pretty well, but this is in no-way a review of the kit, so let's start building!
Although there are some instructions, I find these cheap Chinese kits to assemble themselves if you follow some common sense. So I downloaded some high-res images of the final product and started assembly. The size of the screws was the biggest challenge for me, but in the end everything was assembled pretty robuust and I was ready to start focussing on the software.
My first challenge..
I am no Windows person. I used to be, but almost 10 years ago I switched to a Mac. This was an issue. The controller that is used in the laser cutter is Arduino based. The Arduino uses an FTDI chip to do a USB to Serial conversion. This is pretty well supported on the major 3 operating systems (Windows, *nix, OSX). Somehow, this cutter was not detected by my Mac, which was strange, because I use to do Arduino projects all the time.. But I didn't feel like tinkering with this (yet) and I fired up an old Windows laptop and installed the software.
Today, many SDR enthusiasts and hardware designers use low-powered devices based on the Realtek RTL2832U chip. SDR dongles can be for less than 10 USD, easily placing the technology within an affordable price range for many developers. Stephen GlasskeysTo prepare material for this piece, I used a Terratec Tstick+ (pictured above), on a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.9.5, but virtually any generic USB dongle based on the RTL2832U chip should suffice. Best mac osx ham radio logging software. Simply put, one little chip can perform the same tasks that used to take multiple specialized devices like AM/FM radios, televisions, CBs, or ham radios.SDR was invented in the 1970s, and since then the technology has rapidly advanced and gained popularity. Software Defined Radio(SDR) is 'a radio communication system where components that have been typically implemented in hardware are instead implemented by means of software on a personal computer or embedded system.'
First results
There is no better rush than a DIY project that comes to life! These were my very first cuts on the machine.
As we can see, by default the software is doing line (vector) drawings pretty good! But for the middle image I had to use different software. These kind of thick lines are not supported in the editing part of the software, and overall, the software was pretty poorly written. Sometimes the laser would just stop moving, but kept on punching a hole in my workpiece (upper left image). This was not acceptable!
On the bright side, it looked like my axes where installed correctly. There is no deformation in the image, so the hardware is working correctly.
Although I was happy with the results, bigger projects were not really possible.
As you can clearly see, there are some artefacts in this big piece. Some extra circles were drawn and there were some moments where the laser stopped. (see burn marks). Also, the outline of the image is drawn, but I want the image to be filled in completely.
The default software can obviously only be used for small and quick jobs. Although the quality of the hardware is pretty decent, the software is really the limiting factor of the machine.
Normally, a person would stop here. This is what the kit can do, let's start engraving stuff and impress the world.. well, that's nice, but if you're a geek like me the project is just starting.. let's change the controller software, drive the motors myself and see what this thing is really capable of!
Step One: use an authentic Arduino
I think it's wrong to sell counterfeits as the original thing. Certainly when the project is a open source/open hardware collaboration that supports makers, hobbyists and enthusiasts. Even though the controller was advertised as Arduino based, it is not compatible with the Arduino IDE, so I really wanted to swap the board for the real thing.
Can you download uverse app on a mac. But I was curious why it didn't work on my Mac, so I compared hardware:
In this picture it is really clear to see that the USB2Serial chip is different on the chinese board. Understandable, a FTDI is not a cheap chip, and to press BOM costs, they probably changed it. The downside is that my Mac did not recognise the chip, so I swapped the board and I could use my good old Mac again :-)
The next problem was the firmware.. a empty arduino will not drive stepper motors and fire up a laser, so I needed some control software..
Step Two: Finding the right firmware
When searching for control software, you will find that a CNC machine has almost the same type of controls as an laser cutter. In theory, it is just a X/Y frame that can possible have a Z axis to control the cutting dept. Luckily, CNC controls have a standard called g-code. This is a (serial) interface that will specify some abstract commands (turn spindle on/off, go to position (x,y), draw line, draw circle, etc).
It was pretty obvious that by supporting this standard, I could interface with a lot of existing software, so that became my highest priority.
I found this really cool project that does exactly what I want: use an Arduino to convert g-code to electrical signals for driving stepper motors and turning on/off pins that could drive cooling/spindles/lasers/etc.
So I quickly downloaded GRBL and started to look for support for the control board used in my laser cutter..
Step Three: Change firmware to support my cutter
Off coarse, my laser cutter was not supported out-of-the-box. Which, I don't really mind. I'm a professional software engineer, so getting the machine to work should be a piece of cake for me..
I created my own header-file to support the stepper motor drivers and the laser.
It always feels like a step back. Taking something that works, stripping it and starting to rebuild it, but when it works, the thrill is even bigger!
After a couple of hours of reading wiki's, looking at datasheets and hacking code, my cheap Chinese cutter was fully supported by the GRBL project. I have all the ingredients now to do some real work, let's define a workflow.
Step Four: Software workflow
Now that my lasercutter can be driven used g-code, I need a certain workflow.
Having seen the extremely high prices of commercial software, I really wanted to embrace open source, and create a full open source workflow.
As a start, I will use the open source graphics editor GiMP to convert any photo to grayscale.
After this step, I'm using Inkscape to brush up the image, create paths and generate g-code by using 2 extensions. One for raster-engraving (images) and one for vector-engraving (lines).
And finally, using a open source tool named Universal G-Code Sender, I can send the g-code to my laser cutter, align the laser on a start point and see how long a job takes to finish.
Running all this software on a Ubuntu laptop makes the full software stack open source. It sounds like a bit of a hassle, and I'm pretty sure that there are better alternatives, but this was a quick solution.. and it works really well!
Results
And now the part that everybody is waiting for.. is my open source poor-mans-setup any good?
Let's start off by a small image that has circles and straight lines.
Wow! This was a result that I didn't expected! The lines are pretty sharp and the circle is perfectly round. Also, the laser is now carving almost a millimeter into wood, which was far beyond my expectation of a 2500mW laser.
Let's do that big piece again to see if my g-code conversion is any good and if the machine does not lock up during cutting of a bigger project.
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The 2 small artifacts in the bottom of the image are my own fault, but you can clearly see that the quality and sharpness is way better. Some edges were still a bit shaky, so I dropped the speed of the laser and decreased the power of the leaser.
Finally I wanted to test a photo-realistic image. Here are my results:
Conclusion
I think the results are clear. I now have a machine that is capable of doing photo-realistic engraving and cutting simple lines.
But I won't stop here! This was a very nice introduction into g-code and driving stepper motors. But I started off this article by telling that I wanted a high power laser, not a toy. So I still have some plans to build on this foundation. I want to extend the frame, move the laser to the back by adding mirrors, and change this 2.5W laser into a 200W+ CO2 laser. This will enable me to engrave and cut materials that I can use for enclosures or artwork..
I do lot of stuff like this. In the past I played around with high power LED's (100W+), created tube amps, build my own arcade machine, build electronic cigarettes, and hacked a lot of chinese Chinese gadgets.
I often get the question: 'Why?'. I always give the same answer: 'Because I can'.