CAM-Software

Let’s be honest. All CAM-Software sucks. And if someone claims that their CAM-Software doesn’t suck, they probably haven’t used it extensively enough to find that out. The problem is, that even though all CAM-Software sucks, it still costs at least tens of thousands of whatever currency you are using.

Our CAM-Software also sucks, but at least it’s free and keeps getting better every day.

Jokes aside, our CAM-Software is based on a program called FreeCAD – a free software package that you can install on any computer – but improves performance by at least an order of magnitude and includes many useful additional operations such as thread milling, lead-in inside profiling, 4th axis et cetera. It supports 3 axis, 3+1, 4 and 3+2 and is installed on our machine controllers by default as of 2021. As we currently do not produce – yet – a 5-axis machine, we have little incentive to improve on that topic, although our machine controllers already support 8 axis at full speed.

As true simultaneous 5-axis machining is rarely really needed aside from impellers and other turbines, we are evaluating the possibility of introducing an impeller design, simulation and code generation software to cover those needs.

It is currently not clear if we want to integrate our modifications with “upstream” FreeCAD as we rewrite large portions of the software to be much faster and not crash anymore. 

But of course you don’t need to use our CAM-Software with our machines. Chances are that our machines will work just fine with standard G-code from your favourite software that you learned to love because of that bittersweet price tag.