FreeMill

[CNCadmin]

Has anyone tried FreeMill?

[Dan B]

Yes, I tried it. There isn't much to it. In fact, it's so limited, that it's not much use. If I remember correctly, there is only one type of toolpath available.

Dan

[Swede]

I tried it too and Echo what Dan said. I have 4.0 and wanted to see how freemill compared, thinking I could recommend it to friends as a simple test/demo. The generated toolpaths are limited and not optimized at all. But it's OK, heck it's free.

[Chagrin]

I tried it but couldn't get it to spit out plain ol' G-Code. Might be because I'm an idiot.

Quite limited.

[thuffner3]

I coldn't get it past the point were you choose your cut plane.
The program would lock right up. I've tried to unistall it and reinstall it serveral times , still no luck. I'm running win98se if anyone has any suggestions.

Thanks
Neil

[motomitch1]

I had the same problem were I coldn't get it past the point were you choose your cut plane. The problem on my computer was the ati video board. As it stands, ATI is notorious for having weak OpenGL implementations in its commercial drivers which can result in poor performance and instability in OpenGL-based applications such as freemill.Most video cards based on nVIDIA chipsets perform well with freemill.So after installing a nVIDIA G-force FX 5700 ULTRA 128MB DDR AGP Video card in it worked fine nice program but very limited.

[thuffner3]

That's odd, my current board is a Radeon 8500 -w- an nVidia chipset. Maybe I'll tinker around with the drivers.

Thanks for the though. That's something that never would have occurred to me.

Peace
Neil

[motomitch1]

I took out RADEON 8500LE GPU with 128 mb ddr. ati,s not going to use a nvida gpu in there card.

[motomitch1]

Test out meshcam its a more power full program and it free for testing now and I think it worked with my ATI card.

http://www.cnczone.com/showthread.php?threadid=513

[karbunkle1952]

After reinstalling Freemill several times, I finally got it to post.

I've read that another Fella had the same problem...you hit the post button on the program and nothing happens.

I'm running Windows XP and I had a "Cap'n Obvious" moment. You have to tell Windows to recognize the .spm file as a notepad file. Click on any of the post files in the directory and check the box that says always open this type of file with notepad.

It's still a simple program with no roughing, but I'll use it to cut foam and fool it into roughing by using two drawings, one of them scaled up to simulate a roughing surface.

[Rex Swensen]

Hi FreeMill users,
I had problems with this program locking up (not responding) when attempting to nominate the parting plane. Internet research indictated that it might have something to do with the display adapter and OpenGL.
My card is a Radeon X300.
The problem was finally solved by changing the OpenGL acceleration setting to a lower value in Display/Properties/Advanced/OpenGL. I have advised MecSoft.

While this software is limited (well, it is free!) it will do the sort of 3D sculpting that I need, in conjunction with Rhino.3dm models. It will output an APT file which I convert for use with a Dynamyte DM2400 bench top mill. I am a hobby user.

........... Rex

[qmas99]

Is FreeMill a stand alone CAM software or need a CAD software to use it?