I’m ready to dive into some milling and I’d really like to use my Macbook instead of Windows, but I’m not sure what my options are. I have my MPCNC connected to a raspberry pi with V1Pi installed, but where do I begin with designing, slicing, and milling remotely from my macbook? I’ve searched the forum but haven’t stumbled onto a clear solution that others have used, so if anyone can point me in the right direction to do as much as possible on my Macbook and mill through V1Pi, I’d appreciate it.
CAD: choose your poison. I use onshape, which is free for hobbyists and works on Linux (my OS). It also works on mac. IIRC, fusion 360 also works in mac. I personally don’t like fusion, but it is very popular.
CAM: this is the slicer. Estlcam is the easiest to use, but on mac, you’ll either need to run it in wine or a virtual machine with windows. Fusion 360 has cam too, and Guffy made a full featured post processor for it. But it is 5x-10x more complicated than estlcam. Freecad also has CAM. There was a very good tutorial for it, but I can’t find it ATM.
Gcode sender: once the cam makes the gcode file, you can load it to the v1pi. Other options are repetier host, cnc.js from mac, or put it on an sd and play it from the lcd. You also need to control the machine to set up the job. These choices also support that.
Thanks Jeff. I’ll look into onshape (never heard of it before today).
I tried running Estlcam through a VM but it was SUPER laggy and pretty much unusable. If I recall, I experimented with getting it to run with Wine last year but could never get it sorted out completely. I’ll probably revisit that since Estlcam seems to be the winner for ease of use.
Since I already have v1pi setup, I’ll stick with that for the gcode sender. It’s working quite well on my setup.
Would anyone like to do some step-by-step instructions? I think it would make a helpful page in the docs. I can help with formatting and editing it, but I don’t have a mac.
I’d be happy to document it, but I can’t get it sorted out. I’ve installed wine and tried a variety of winetricks to git it running, but no luck. I stumbled onto this topic and ran through the instructions, but the app just crashes at launch: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46014
I won’t be able to do anything with it until after Thanksgiving, but I’m happy to document it if you guys can help me sort through the issues.
I want to jump in here too. I’m a Mac user and I’m at the software stage of my MPCNC.
While I’m a complete newbie at all of this, I am recognizing the challenges with MACs and would be happy to get involved in documentation and experiences from a complete newbie.
My other life skills will lend to this project quite well!
I’m on the software stage of setting up my MPCNC as well and am a Mac user. I really don’t feel like setting up a Windows VM just to use one app.
I was researching last night and discovered “jscut(dot)org” that appears to be a browser-based CAM software application. I’m in the early stages of research but it looks promising.
At a minimum I’m going to try to go through the tutorial of drawing the crown file but using jscut instead of estlcam. We’ll see how it goes!
Hey, look at that! There’s a version called playonmac. I’m trying to install the 32 bit version of estlcam but getting a bunch of installation errors. From what I’ve ready it looks like I need to include POL_Install_directx9, POL_Install_dotnet40, and POL_Install_gdiplus.
The first time I tried installing it with playonmac, I got an error about a Windows mismatch. Tried again, and got an error that Wine timed out installing dotnet40. I’m currently running it again, but it’s taking forever. @LincolnW and @burbonhillibilly, if you guys could give it a shot, that would be great. Maybe it’s just something funky on my macbook.
I’m giving up on this. I tried playonmac and ended up getting a lot of malware blocks when installing everything. I ended setting up a Virtual Box VM and installing it on Windows XP, which seems to work OK. I’m going to try another VM with Windows 7 because… well, Windows XP.
Windows 7 on a VM works like a charm for estlcam. I ran through a test export into v1pi and didn’t have any issues at all. If anyone else sees this and considers running estlcam on a mac, save yourself a lot of headaches and go with a VM running Windows.
