CNC noob: What to learn FreeCad or Kiri:Moto?

Community Support Other Software
1

Hi All,

So I’ve had my CNC for a while and only have been doing some basic things to learn how to use it. For the moment I’ve just been using CAMLab off the Sienci web page. However occasionally my internet connection goes down which then makes it impossible to use CAMLab.

So I though I’d try learning a more advanced CNC software tool. I’m only running Linux so it came down to Kiri:Moto and FreeCAD. I ran a local copy of Kiri:Moto, and also installed FreeCAD. Unfortunately they seem to be geared towards expert users. I’m having a hard time figuring out the steps that CAMLab seemed to do automatically.

Anyone have any opinions which one I should spend my time learning? Any tutorials they can point me would also be great.

Initially I’d like to do plaques and relief maps. Eventually I’d like to machine some aluminum parts.

Let me know?

Thanks,
S.Lam

2

Hi and welcome to the forum.

I am also pretty new at this, my background includes Blender 3d experience, so a lot of my models originate with that program.

When I tried to use FreeCAD to process my properly manifolded 3d models into CAM paths, every attempt failed. Also the many procedures required by FreeCAD to convert were tedious and complicated. It might have been my own incompetence, but I followed a step by step FreeCAD tutorial multiple times with multiple models exported from Blender.
If you make your models from scratch in FreeCAD, I would guess that it works fine, but it did not work for my needs.

I resorted to learning KiriMoto, and, besides the trouble of learning new terminologies for conventional CAM operations, it has worked reliably for me.