Hello all. After all the excitement of last weekend drawing crowns my neighbour had to retrieve his PC. To fill my time I’ve been diving into Fusion 360 (Mac). My question to the collective here is whether I should try to find a cheap (~$250) PC to run Estlcam or if I should make my way down the Fusion 360 gcode learning curve which I’ve heard is a bit tricky. I plan to develop an SD card workflow - makes the most sense for what I intend to do with the machine.
Ive been 3d modelling since 1996 and am totally comfortable with the Fusion modelling workflow. Just the CAM stuff I’m completely green with. All words of wisdom appreciated.
What are the specs of your Mac? Because option number 3 is buy Parallels and a Windows key (about $100 total) and just run estlcam on there. That’s exactly what I do and don’t have a problem with it. I use my RPi and CNC.js as my interface to the CNC.
Up until two months ago I was running a MBP 2011 with it and didn’t run into too many problems. It was getting slow but I had a lot of applications open.
I don’t know why I didn’t entertain that one. I used to run boot camp so I could run my RBC flight simulator but haven’t done that in years (and years). I think I’ll look into that - thanks so much for reminding me.
I haven’t ever tried parallels. Was it pretty unobtrusive on your Mac? Why did you choose that over boot camp?
It bogs the Mac down if you are starved for recourses with memory, that was the only downside that I experienced with it. That main reason I use Parallels over Boot Camp is because I have my Fusion 360 and other design apps on my Mac OS (OSX w/e) and I can easily make a change in my mac environment Fusion 360 instead of needing to install all of the programs over again. But for Parallels I even had Solidworks on it for a little bit and it worked really well for being a VM on a 2011 MBP. In the end it comes down to a flexibility thing.
Maybe try jscut.org? I think I tried it before and it has compatible code for Marlin (uses G1 for rapids and cut moves, but changes feedrates accordingly. It’s slower than estlcam, but I believe it works well for Marlin. I believe the Safari version is dead at the moment, so Firefox or chrome is needed. Can send directly to chilipepper for Marlin too.