RE : Ideas to promote making and using free hardware designs (was Re: FSF continuously harms Free Hardware)

[Arthur Torrey]

An excellent post by Paul Fernhout, but I see one really HUGE problem, namely 
that I don't know of ANY Free Software tool or tool-chain that can get a person 
from 'beer-mat' to 'g-code'  (For those not familiar with the CNC world, g-code 
is the 'assembly language' of the CNC manufacturing world...  

I am a member of the Artisan's Asylum maker-space (formerly in Somerville, MA, 
temporarily shut down while moving to Allston) and would dearly love to be able 
to make the hardware that I can draw and design in LibreCAD (2D) or possibly 
FreeCAD, gCAD3D or some other Free Software 3D CAD package, but I have not been 
able to find any way to get from those packages to g-code that I can feed to 
our CNC machines.

Instead I have to use Proprietary CAD packages (some of which have limited 
'Free as in Beer' offerings) to make proprietary format files in order to 
generate (proprietary) tool-paths to feed to a (proprietary) pre-processor that 
turns them into machine appropriate g-code....  (Ironically, at least one of 
the machines I'm running that g-code on is using LinuxCNC as a controller).  I 
haven't even found a path that would let me move a design from a Free CAD 
package into one of the proprietary packages to do the tool-path steps.

For electronics stuff, KiCAD is amazingly good, I've heard professional board 
designers say that it can go head to head against the $10K / seat commercial 
programs.  I haven't done anything in the 3D printing world, but I've heard 
there are some packages that are at least competent for that.  However there is 
NOTHING I've been able to find that is capable of even basic CNC machining 
g-code, let alone anything close to modern High Speed Machining (as done by 
things like HSM-Works)

As such, Paul's proposals for OSCOMAK and other shared collections of design 
data seem like they would be of little use if there is no way to get the 
collected data into a new design that can be manufactured....

I've been urging the FSF to put CAD onto the 'high priority' list for years, 
but so far no luck...

ART

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Arthur Torrey - <arthur_torrey@comcast.net>
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