I had an old version of estlcam working under wine. I haven’t tried the newer versions. Kiri:moto is browser based and works on anything.
Kiri:moto is much more automated. You always give it and stl (not dxf) and then you play with the settings until it picks the routes you want. If it doesn’t do what you need, you can’t manually edit it. But if you get it working, it is very low effort to do new projects.
Estlcam is very powerful. You usually work with dxfs (which are line drawings, not 3D shapes). You select which edges to route and it can trace them. If the tracing fails, you can mamually click and snap to the edges. It can do stls. But it traces the whole shape. It is for 3D carving.
Most of what I’ll do on the lowrider will be cutting out plywood from dxf files, so I’ll use estlcam for that then.
Sometimes I’ll do 3d carving as well. I want to make a dressform from foam insulation material by cutting a stl of my torso I had created by a 3d scan, in layers (using prusaslicer :D), carving that, and sticking the layers back together.
So for this I’ll need kiri:moto.
On the carvera it’ll probably be a mix of the two, depending on the complexity of the model. Simple 2.5d things I usually design in dxf through qcad, while more complex things (or things which are benefited from parameterization) I tend to design using solidpython2 via openscad to stl.
I’ll have to play a bit with makera CAM as well, and see how it compares to these two. If I’m not mistaken it can handle both dxf and stl files, and (from today) supports the 4th axis as well.
But I have no idea how good it’s path creation is, and how well you can manipulate it.
I’ve managed to get estlcam running on wine, but it behaves poorly on my computer, probably due to me using a tiling window manager (awesome wm), which plays havoc with the tooltips estlcam wants to show (at least that’s what I think is going on). But it seems to run fine on a Windows VM, so that’s good enough for me. I need Windows VMs for things like Garmin and Tomtom map updates, so I have that infrastructure set up anyway.
The shift key thing is something I don’t think I would have ever found on my own. I came across it mentioned in this post: EstlCAM 12 on Linux - #7 by soup.
He mentions that behavior might be specific to his laptop a Lenovo ideapad and I’m using Lenovo thinkpads so there’s a chance it’s a lenovo thing but worth a shot either way.
That does bring me to one reason I’m tempted to try out kiri:moto though. I have a dedicated shop laptop and I like the fact that onshape is cloud based so it doesn’t matter what computer I’m using. I like the idea of using the kiri:moto plugin for onshape for that reason, but l don’t like the fact it uses stl files for flat stock.
I may have not communicated well though. You can still cut out sheet parts (2.5D) in kiri:moto. You just need to pop the dxf into CAD and extrude it to thickness, then export as stl. Kiri is very good ad deciding what it should cut. As long as it does it right, it is very easy.
I still think you’re doing the right thing. But if you hit a frustration, give kiri:moto a try anyway. It is quick to learn and try.
Kiri will do that automatically, but you need to convert to svg though as dxf are proprietary files. Import the svg, then dial in the material thickness, and it all just works.