Programmer’s Log Programmers Writing Stuff – Garry Bodsworth

Open-Source CAD/CAM

I spent over seven years working in the CAD/CAM industry. It's a very archaic industry with virtually no open-source building blocks available, and those that are tend be be extremely old or not even useful.

There are a few green shoots of open-source out there. First up there is wildcat-cad which is an attempt to create an open-source 3D solid modelling kernel and associated tools.

There is also heekscad which is a modelling program using the OpenCascade solid modelling kernel (GPL licensed I believe). There is also a CAM add-on for heekscad called heekscnc with a lot of associated libraries providing some good functionality.

An additional program is voxelcut which allows for a solid machining simulation to see what damage you'll do to your hardened steel.

One of the libraries is libarea which is for area-clearance algorithms in CAM. This is normally one of the most closely guarded secrets in commercial CAD/CAM so it is interesting to see an open implementation.

libactp is an adaptive clearance toolpath which originated from Freesteel. They've got it integrated into heekscnc so you can try it out for yourself.

You can keep track of a lot of this stuff through Dan Heek's blog.

Another unrelated program is monocam which uses C-sharp as a development language and has soem interesting algorithms like the drop cutter which provides the basis for most 3D machining algorithms.