Vcarving software

I built a Primo and want to do some Inlay stuff and am wondering what Software too use.I like FREE but would consider others.The pay ones seem ease to use.

Many friends of this forum use EstlCam, a very easy program with good performance. You can also use it for free to try it. Then if you like it you can buy the license which is very cheap.

Maybe this helps. :slightly_smiling_face:

Estlcam can be used for free, but paying removes the nag screen and 50€ is not too much compared to the rest of the investment into a CNC. You need a CAM program anyway. :smile:

Yes, I have a paid sub for Estlcam. (well worth it)
Tried some freehand worked somewhat. I will watch this Vid.

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i would suggest you to start with ESTLCAM first, not because you can use it for free with no limitations but because is the most used one around here, then you can have the adventure of trying the carveco or the vectric flavours

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I deleted my post because the light bulb turned on in my head and what I had stated was not true. EstlCAM doesn’t do the step down as you stated (even in 12.119A). I thought it did, but the max depth turned out to be 4.94 mm (and not the 7.5 mm that would be required). So, I will follow your tutorial when I get around to doing a deep inlay using EstlCAM. :blush:

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Believe me: I have tried a lot of different softwares and none of them do it a lot better. V-Carve just offers the option to rearrange the cut order so you can do it in the program, but that’s like a 700€ difference for the program, nearly more than I paid for the CNC.
Oh, and if you are lazy: Just run the programs 1 and 2 until the toolchange directly after each other and let 3 run through completely including the toolchange. The final pass with the V-bit takes off such a small amount that full depth is not a problem at all for that pass. :slight_smile:

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Philipp, you really got my attention with lazy because I are LAZY.I saw what you did in the vid.and stacked the gcode ,very interesting, but I am not ready for that.I am starting with some text I did this by Female text is say 30 I made it 29.75, mirrored it, and it works fairly well now this is Green redwood.



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How and when do I put in tool changes?

Estlcam does that automatically if you select a tool to clear the carves first. :slight_smile:

In your “texts” in settings, you can define the tool change. I start it with a big, easy-to-see comment so that I can find each tool change when I’m dividing the code. If you include a unique word, you can use find/replace to move between tool changes.