My name is Chuck Tilbury and I am a new CNC user. I just bought a cheap Chinese router/engraver and have gotten it mostly set up. I make Irish Pennywhistles in aluminum and serve customers all over the world. My whistles are professional quality musical instruments. You can check it out here if you are interested in what they look like: Tilbury Woodwinds Company - home I also work a day job as a contract systems software developer at places like AMD, Dell, and IBM.

I got the engraver so that I can put some artwork on my whistles. I have it figured out to the point of getting it right on scrap materials. I also want to cut holes in thin wall round tubing as well as some other machining operations. I think the machine will do that if I configure it correctly. I need to find the software to do it. I really want to stick with open-source if possible.

I am a big fan of open source software so I am using LinuxCNC to drive the machine, which seems realible I have been using Inkscape and Qcad to do artwork. I also have used the machine to engrave some flat art pieces, which I like very much. I want to do 2.5D engravings of pictures, but I have not found the software that really works for that. I have tried a bunch including image-to-gcode that is bundled with LinuxCNC. If anyone knows of a package that will do that, I would be very interested in hearing about it.

Thanks for the great site!

All the best,
Chuck Tilbury