I’m just about to get started actually having my LR4 ‘air cut’ some things, just to get a feel.
Unfortunatly, there is no Estlcam for Mac… I was thinking then of going with Fusion360, which I’m familiar with from a CAD perspective, but have never used for CAM (as I’ve never done that before at all…), but I read there are issues with feed rates, and it sounds like possibly not the best option?
I also saw Kiri:Moto and am now thinking I might go that route?
Anybody have any experience with any of this and CAM via Mac?
…and I’m using Parallels for ESTLcam on Windows 11 Pro “ARM edition.” To clarify, I’m on a MacBook Pro which has an “Apple M1 Max” processor chip, and that’s an ARM chip, which means my VM’s need to be ARM based. With the advent of Windows 11, or around the same time, Micro$oft began to offer an ARM edition of Win 11, which is not only offered but even supported by MS even when used in a virtual machine. I’m looking for a link to support that statement and hopefully this is the right one: Windows Arm-based PCs FAQ - Microsoft Support.
Note: I already needed and used Parallels for other software, so for me this this was multiple birds with one stone.
Another note: I had really old Windows software that by use of an installed kind of “interpreter” program, I’ve been able to get it to still run. I’m amazed to have some software that’s really useful to me, and that dates back to either Windows 95 era, or perhaps even older, Windows 3.1 era, that runs for me in this Win 11 Pro VM.
I’ll chime in here as well. I use Parallels with Estlcam for most work because I’ve found that the Whisky solution above takes a very long time to calculate V-Carve paths and it’s actually failed for me. I’ve been trying to improve my inlay technique, and I do find Parallels to be a better solution for that type of work.
Formerly I used Parallels for other things and I was hoping to get out from under that subscription, but I made the painful decision to get another year. One day I hope to be able to drop it for Millmage, but that project seems to be moving incredibly slowly (from what I read the V-carve and 3D stuff is turning out to be hard.)
Thank you all for the advice! I’m making slow progress, but it’s fun! I’d rather go slow and not break stuff! Not cutting anything but air until I’m sure I really get whats happening!
I am a Mac user in the same boat as you, just got done with the primary build and was working on getting the strut plates set up to cut this weekend. Using that as a trial run….
Starting to learn Freecad, and getting somewhere with that. However the CAM part of Freecad is a fully different beast. Making a part from the Scad SVG of the Strut plate was fine after a bit of learning, but for the life of me I could not get the CAM software to find the holes - at all.
Moved to Kiri:Moto and after learning the ins and out of that, worked great! It does not make the most efficient Gcode, it would pick the screw holes randomly to cut - but it cut screw holes! I think I am going to continue to learn Freecad as my CAD tool, and I’ll see how much I can get out of with Kiri:moto.
Also did look into wine virtualization for ESTLcam, but Whisky is no longer supported and no updates will be made:
His recommendation is CrossOver, which I know is a pretty great Wine emulator. May get a trial of it and see how well ESTLCam does, but I would rather stay away from virtualization if I can.
I’m not sure if it still works, but there’s a thread on this forum that provides a custom post processing script for fusion 360 that will replace all the slow rapids with faster ones. I used that when I still had my cnc.