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

[Dr Andrew A. Adams]

Arthur Torrey wrote:

> 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.

Arthur,

This isn't my field, but I thought I'd seen something that at least fills 
part of this chain. The OpenBuilds-CAM and OpenBuilds-CONTROL software are 
AGPL
https://github.com/OpenBuilds/OpenBuilds-CAM
https://github.com/OpenBuilds/OpenBuilds-CONTROL

Are these not part of the toolchain you're talking about here? The CAM 
software description says it takes SVG, DXF or Bitmap and produces GCODE for 
sending to CONTROL, which controls some machines.

This does not seem to meet all of the toolchain you need, but it seems to 
fill at least part of it.



-- 
Dr Andrew A Adams                      aaa@meiji.ac.jp
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/