Hi All,

Just wanted to let you know about a project called monocam that I and a few others have worked a bit on.
http://code.google.com/p/monocam/

It's open-source and in C#. It's hopefully going to be cross-platform running on NET/Windows and under Mono for mac/linux.

not much works yet, but the one thing that does work is an algorithm called drop-cutter, where you position a toroidal tool (cylindrical, spherical or toroidal) in the XY plane somewhere high and drop it down to touch an STL model. That can be used for rough and finish 3D paths.

Recently I've coded a kd-tree data structure for storing triangles which hopefully should speed up the algorithm.

There's no GUI yet. I played around with OpenGL a while ago but that did not go anywhere...

So if anyone is able and willing to work on a GUI in OpenGL or Direct3D (Windows only), or has brilliant ideas for new toolpath algorithms, then please check the website and maybe join the mailing-list!

regards,

AW

Why use C# and why create yet another gui?

Wouldn't it be better to write just a library that does toolpath generation
and plug that into an other CAD program? There are enough CAD programs
that have been written (BRLCAD, QCAD, pythoncad, ) ... you might loose most of your time on writing a GUI....

I think it would be better to write a library that does 3D -> GCODE conversion, and then some command line utilities that read some 3D format, and output GCODE.
If such tools are something like:

main()
{
geom* object import_geometry("input.dxf")
toolpath* path = create_toolpath_for_geometry(object)
write_toolpath_to_file("output.gcd")
}

then people that have developed a CAD program could easily integrate that into their gui...

yep, you are absolutely right! The C# project hasn't moved anywhere in the past 6 months.

Now I've been working a bit in Python and using VPython for visualization. There's still a lot to do on drop-cutter, and the next thing I want to do is called 'push-cutter' for calculating waterline toolpaths.

I recently found shed skin, a compiler that translates Python to C++, if people want to use the CAM-library from C++ programs (+ you get a 20x speedup).
http://code.google.com/p/shedskin/

Another interesting development is the wildcat CAD program:
http://code.google.com/p/wildcat-cad/

if anyone is interested in helping out, let me know. The first thing would be to get the existing functionality in C# ported over to Python and then work on some bugfixes. Then start on new cam algorithms.

Anders