Anyone used Heeks CNC?

Has anyone tried this out yet? Generates g codes from a variety of file formats like step, STL etc. Some interesting background too on toolpath generation techniques if you look into the blog links.

I'm fairly new to CNC but this looks pretty interesting. Pretty amazing considering it's largely the work of one person (Dan Heeks). I suspect it may be limited to 2.5 / 3 axis operations but that's enough for the likes of me for the time being.

I was looking at HSMXpress recently which is free for 3-axis CNC but it's much more of a heavyweight product and requires Solidworks.

As I said, pretty amazing to have come up with something as capable looking as this.

Heeks CNC website **LINK**

Youtube demo **LINK**

Murray

Hi Murray;

No, but my impression from a year or two ago was that "FreeCAD" was where it was at.

A guy called Anders Wallin was doing the CAM lib for it - smart guy, not only because he uses LinuxCNC, but also because he's doing quite well with the CAM library stuff. (Now, I think he could use some of my Cylinder-Triangle Intersection tests that run on the GPU, but I digress...)

Was using some open source stuff like dxf2gcode, and pycam, but ended up with purchasing CamBam; it runs on Linux, (and Windows, if you wish) and works quite well.

OpenSCAD is a great tool for creating drawings, if your mind works that way (mine does).

Not much help, but maybe some pointers?

John.

Interestingly, you may have spotted that Anders Wallin's blog is linked to from Dan's site. It looks as if they have been collaborating on some aspects of the project. Presumably Anders' toolpath algorithms are made use of. I also get the impression that FreeCAD was felt to be close in terms of values/aspirations. Presumably that work was what the "Opencamlib"(?) references were about. HeeksCNC is more of a standalone spinoff from that, by the sounds of it.

I tried FreeCAD some months ago. I may have been unlucky but the features I was attempting were plagued by crashes (of the program!). I hope it evolves and delivers a comprehensive feature set. Many of these open source projects are staggering in what they have achieved.

Although I'm fairly mathematically literate, I just couldn't get on with OpenSCAD. It just isn't how my brain computes. It's not as young as it used to be, which probably doesn't help either.

Murray

Hi. Yes, HeeksCNC uses "opencamlib" by Anders Wallin for its 3D machining.

HeeksCNC is not the best CAD tool. Most users import a 2D dxf file or a 3D step file made in another CAD software and use HeeksCNC for adding operations to make g-code file for their machine.

Edited By JasonB on 25/06/2014 17:43:14

Hi Dan

That's interesting background. I think I was able to import a simple model from Solidworks in STL format. The other formats caused mine to lock up. I was looking at how it generated toolpaths, ie g-codes from STL.

I saw Anders' posts about the challenges of determining when the tool had reached the model surface which isn't simple. However, I didn't burrow far enough into opencamlib to understand which toolpath strategies are implemented in it (and by extension, HeeksCNC). For instance, do you use"adaptive clearing" or the simpler parallel stepover method? Amazing piece of work!

BR

Murray

I know Anders' opencamlib does waterline toolpath, but HeeksCNC only uses opencamlib to drop 2D toolpath onto the model using the tool shape. But HeeksCNC's 2D toolpath does standard 2D clearing parameters like parallel stepover or zig-zag. It doesn't do adaptive clearing, although we experimented with a library to do this, at one point.

Hi Murray;

Not *that* tough - Code I wrote/modified does it on the GPU, assuming the tool is a cylinder - it does a cylinder/triangle intersection test on all triangles in a shape, and gives a "pushback" vector if the cylinder intersects a triangle.

It was for virtual reality code - so you could bounce off surfaces fairly realistically. It is in the "FreeWRL" open source package, in a file called CollisionGPU.c, if I remember correctly.

I used it recently as part of an internal work project relating to using graphics processors for non-graphics uses.

(Disclaimer - part of the code was written by a bright student I had who is now the director of a quite famous company in California, if I remember correctly - this was in the pre-OpenCL days so his code was not optimized for GPUs, and had some other difficulties, but it was a good starting point for me. Very bright chap this ex-student is...)

All kinds of fun!

JohnS.

Edited By John Alexander Stewart on 27/06/2014 20:33:47